One Year of Not Playing by the Rules: check.

One year since I started my Insane Plan that Works Well. Last year today I was exhuasted, scared, and my soul was missing. I wasn't me, but a shell, waiting for herself to catch up with her own bravery. This year, well, you know. It's working.

20th Reunion of class of '87 tonight, I live in town, so why not? I haven't seen but four from my graduating class since we graduated, and two of them live here. Didn't go to the 10th, as was in the middle of Divorce Depression, and really didn't feel like explaining All That complicated psychotic jumble to a room full of strangers. This year though, I live here and can hardly avoid it, have good things to report, questions to ask, and a cool ass car to drive, Sally, over to Rusty's, my berg's local "swank" bar. Also, I have M, a date, a sweet, a sexy good soul draped in lovely dreds, who in his philosopher's mind has opted to go and be amused. He was under no obligation to do so, but thinks it will be hilarious to find out how I am remembered by these folk (answer: pissed off, unpredictable, smart, mischevious, loner on edges of many cliques, pissed off, incapable of trucking with bullshit or hypocrisy, and the girl who ate lunch on the roof for a month before anyone noticed). Yeh, my family was a turbulent pack back then, and the PRSC you got at school was the result of the relative detante or live fire going on at home the night before. Plus, I was mad at all the adults for f*cking up the world I was going to have to live in. Somethings don't change.

Like, for instance, these scruptious and sublime pics at MSNBC from NASA, convincing us that we should go back into space just now. Ambivalence. There's the Western Culture's obvious assumption that exploration is a Good, and there's the science, and the pretty pretty pictures, AND there's the money we could be dedicating to Keeping Earth Habitable, Educating the Kiddos, Feeding the Hungry, Freeing Tibet, Curing Illness, Gifting the World with Hydrogen Cells so the freaky dream I had last night won't come true........ Because the last great Space Thrust did, it is true, result in fantastic leaps in technology and profit (e.g. this blog, iPods, MRIs, XM radio, the genome project, velcro, powederd orange juice), but the logic is suspect. We have come to think of projects -- space exploration, war -- as sources of profit (e.g. militaryindustrialcomplex) because one time, once, war did generate profit, known as the 1950's -- which are no longer profitable. Would be nice if The Leaders would do some return-on-investment analysis once in a while. A parallel worth questioning, mulling. But, I do love the shiny shiny pretty pictures.

The cultural/spiritual schedule then continues: Saturday morning, Bodyworks exhibit in the city, evening Henry Rollins at the Pageant, the Provoked tour -- and possible return to the Reunion recption, on the very high-school condition that one of my friends is still there after I get back from the city. She will attend this evening at Rusty's on the condition that I am still there. Very high-school indeed. In between dead people as sculpture and Henry oogling, grading of papers for my 102 or maybe reading of anthology essays at some cafe in the city. Next weekend, Bloomington, IN to listen to His Holiness the Dalai Lama (Jasmine's catch and idea). Tuesday after that: Dublin for a week of ancestral connection and Challenging Cultures of Death and editing the anthology with A. Rather the experiential bonanza.

Anniversary dream: watching a TV show: flamingo salmon feathered swans riding herds of polar bears in the mountains where the National Geographic style voice over informed viewers that "here, even the frost is hot." Some paradoxical world in which what we know to be cold will burn us. Then, coffee and the repair of a ladder before going to school to teach in a room with no walls or ceiling, but a room anyway, with students who would not believe me about the TV show and refused (!) to even watch portions of it on YouTube. Then, handing back of papers, for which process they simply put their heads down. The cat meowed in my ear, and I woke up.

Also, finally, some rain.