Tax Table Update

After being on hold to the IRS for 37 minutes (complete with obligatory musical serenade) I have been shoved into some sort of white noise that feels suspiciously like I was pushed off the 'on hold' grid.
What should I do?
Press 0?
Hang up and start over?
Keep waiting?

Tax Table

According to our tax preparer, we owe a lot of money to the IRS. So much so that we set up monthly payments and are currently still working on paying it off, estimating that we may still be paying by tax time next year.

Imagine our surprise when we received a letter stating the amount we owed was actually less than a third of that amount.

I'm on hold to the IRS right now to double check that I've read everything right. While I'm on hold I have plenty of time to eat breakfast.

A verse comes to mind:
"You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies."

Remaining in hope that "goodness and mercy will follow".

Tomorrowland: A Review (Spoiler Alert)

If you, like me, always thought of Tomorrowland as a magical kind of place that you wanted to go to, then you too will go to the movie Tomorowland with anticipation, as I did.

I wish I could say that it was what I expected. I even wish I could say it was unexpected, and delightfully so. I wish I could say I liked it. I really wanted to. After all, the world of tomorrow should be everything we wish today to be and more.

Instead, the ever grumpy Frank Walker, played by the dashingly handsome but jadedly grumpy George Clooney dominated the atmosphere. It was like spending two solid hours with George Clooney and he was unhappy for most of it. Of course the story explained why he was grumpy. Of course he smiled a little in the end, which helped. A little.

The most innovative thing about the movie was the stunning time travel scene that honestly snagged me right off when I saw the trailer. Clever as it was, the evolution of the plot never surpassed that interesting editing trick.
 
The story:
NASA is shutting down the space program and destroying the rocket launch. Our heroine Casey, played brilliantly by Brit Robertson, a disappointed adolescent, enters by breaking into NASA with a remote controlled homemade drone with the goal of shutting down the cranes that are set to demolish the equipment, and soon finds herself in jail. As she is picking up her personal effects after posting bail, she finds a 'magic button' which propels her to another world when she touches it.

We then go back in time to the era when space exploration was at its heyday and we meet Clooney's character as a not-so-grumpy child. He visits the World's Fair in 1962, hoping to win a prize for his invention, a homemade personal jet-pack. He's rebuffed by the contest's sole judge, Nix, played by a grumpy Hugh Laurie. There's nothing we can really work with here, Laurie always plays grumpy parts. Walker is also given a 'magic button' from an enigmatic, but not really human girl named Athena, and it follows that he is smitten with the girl and the button, which takes him to the future, a sterile, highly mobile society where movement of every dimension seems paramount. The celestial city of the future is disappointingly familiar - crowded and busy, but most importantly for young Frank, his jet-pack is repaired by a mechanical genius of a robot.

We go back and forth from the present and the future many times with the characters, and in the end we find that the main characters, Frank and Casey, with the help of the droid girl Athena are the true Saviors of civilization. According to the IMDB blurb about the movie the future is in their collective memory.

Here's my problem. I don't much like the world of the present as portrayed by the movie - the modern ills of poverty, obesity, war, natural disaster, and the dismantling of the space program, which seems to have been the pinnacle of technological achievement, at least by the movie's standards. I don't like the world of Tomorrowland either, as it offered only more feindishly power-hungry leaders (although here I must say Laurie's portrayal of the evil Nix sizzled).

And then there was the question, or rather set of questions, I'm still trying to unravel enough to even ask:
If the vision of the demise of Tomorrowland was true, did Frank, Casey and Athena  save the present world and the future story of Tomorowland with one fell swoop? Both civilizations seemed on the brink, but Tomorrowland more definitively so. And did Casey save the world just by thinking she could, or by destroying Nix, or by throwing a bomb? Why couldn't Walker, a genius after all, have gotten his mental act togther if all it took was a triumph of positive mental thought? What was the spark in Casey's character that turned the tide?  Being gutsy? Being clever? Being positive? Thinking she could?

My takeaway is confusion. I wished that I could sum up the story with a recognizable thesis, but I just can't. It was a jumble to me. Perhaps I missed something?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Partial Book Review of Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar, and Swabbing the Deck

How do you run your life? Do you push yourself, pull yourself or follow yourself?

I ran across a snappy little book yesterday during my whirlwind trip to the library that was written by a high school drop-out. He also happens to be the son of the author of the famous book Jonathon Livingston Seagull. I have not yet read it, but back in my high school and college days it was being read and discussed nearly everywhere. (note to self: Read Jonathon Livingston Seagull)

After dropping out of high school and becoming an emancipated minor, the author of Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar went on to teach himself computer programming and work for Apple. Timing surely had a part in his success due to the fact that in the 80's the industry was in dire need of young kids who intuitively could understand and perform programming, but this young man made a name for himself by literally taking charge of his own education.

There are many lessons to learn from his example, the first and foremost not being 'you should drop out of school immediately'. The fan site for Jonathon Livingston Seagull quotes on its cover page, "This is a story for those who follow their hearts.", and "This is a story for those who yearn to fly their own way."  Clearly, yet ironically in spite of his early emancipation, this boy managed to glean from the spirit of his father's famous work. The nugget from the book, written in a humorous pirate-buccaneering theme, that resonates for me is the admonition to "follow your energy". By this he meant that rather than force yourself into things, you should pay attention to what you're most interested in doing and let this be your guide.

As a fairly confirmed right brainer, I'd been doing this for years, but with much guilt. I've been following myself rather than pushing myself but feeling as if I really should be pushing a lot more. Sample inner conversation: 'I should make a schedule for when I mop the kitchen floor. No I'll do it when I'm ready, when I want to.' Strangely, the 'deck gets swabbed' with some regularity, even if I don't plan it. When the time is right, it happens. Midway through my 50's, I doubt I'll change this modus operandi  much. But now I've been given permission.

I haven't finished the book yet. But so far it's already delivered the finest gift a book can give, confirmation of something I already knew but couldn't put into words.

Good vs Evil

Woke up this fine morning from the middle of a dream where I was being held captive by a sadistic scientist. There was fear, anger and a question in my own mind about whether or not he'd kill me and the others that he'd entrapped in his wacky hi-tech complex where elevators turned into passageways and back into elevators that lead to other rooms. Adding to the threat of death was the question of how he'd kill us, and the very real possibility that it would involve terror and torture of some kind since he'd already given us some hints that involved animal cruelty. Survival was my sole motivation, and I hoped I'd be rescued when I strategically placed my backpack in front of a window hoping that my family would see it and know where I was.

Although waking up was the best part of this dream, I'm fascinated by what the dream gave my imagination, and what it told me about myself. You see, I've been on a fifty six year long faith journey that has certainly included ups, downs, doubt, zeal and probably a very typical American Christian mindset. The problem of evil in my personal life has been limited to the banal. In other words, I have yet to meet a real life sadistic scientist, and the possibility of being captured and held hostage by one is remote. That doesn't mean I'm a stranger to evil, just that using the term evil would be a little dramatic when describing my problems.

Maybe.

Unless you believe, as I do, that unseen forces of good and evil are at work everywhere. You see, everyday I fight the urge to be self absorbed, to be greedy, to be deceitful about my motives, to meditate on fear, and to let survival swallow real life as it passes through me. The pull to the dark side is real.

But, there's always a window somewhere. Just like in my dream prison, I have the sunlight of good streaming in. The choice to walk in step with evil is always a prison, but a real world of good exists brighter and bigger outside. Just like my dream, it all happens in the mind.

How to Train Your Dragon

We all have an inner dragon. That voice of woe that brings us the hot breath of doom and gloom. That sneaky little nagging, doubtful, worrisome whisper that we nurse almost hourly. "I'll never get out of debt."  "She is smarter than me."  "I don't think I have what it takes to realize my dreams." and my personal favorite, "When is the other shoe going to drop?"

If you deny you have one, I will challenge the fact that you are even alive.

Anyway, lately I've been challenged to talk to myself the way I'd like to be talked to. "I will be out of debt."  "I am intelligent."  "I have what it takes to realize my dreams."  And so, I've been doing it. It feels a little funny at first, almost like bragging. But that doesn't stop me. I've realized that in some weird way I've been superstitious about my life and tried to worry about things as a buffer for them actually happening. Sometimes I even feel proud of myself for thinking ahead about some natural disaster as if it's so crazy it couldn't happen , and now I've prevented it. So you see, I do feel my own thoughts are powerful, but I've been using them in a back door sort of way.

I've begun to be intentional about my thoughts, and about the things I say that I will do.

And do you know what? I feel as if I've walked out of a prison of my own making. The dragon is being trained.

Compassion

What the world needs now is compassion.

Compassion is the cushion that shields our fragile hearts from the jagged edges of the reality of death, sickness and hatred.

When turning on the news, or even opening up my inbox, my first reaction is judgment, a knee jerk reaction to distance myself from catastrophe. That isn't, can't be me. But on one level it is, and it is with myself that I dole out the most compassion. I see why I mess up. I see how I could be misunderstood.

Compassion is love's cousin in workclothes. In order to give compassion I must suspend judgment and stand in the mud with someone. I'd like to be able to do this in Baltimore for both the protesters and the police. I am miles away, and yet, they are in my living room.

As with all of these situations about which I can actually do nothing, I can frame an attitude which will ripple out all the way to Baltimore. So can you.