Look over there, it's a sex scandal!

I've been reading a book, recommended by a friend, called "Astrology for the Soul." I'm not a devout believer of astrology but I find pretty much any "what's it all about, what am I all about" questioning to be helpful and enjoyable. This book is about the North Node, which dictates what this life is all about for us, based on our past life! As the story goes, in my past life, I was a queen or some kind of royalty and I came into this life bossing people around, wanting to get my way, including my parents. Which is pretty much true. While it's natural for me to pursue the spotlight, it says, I will not be happy there and should instead devote myself to a humanitarian cause. Have I not been fumbling towards that same conclusion for months now? The description of my love life is shockingly true and too embarrassing to disclose here.

But I think the most interesting point is that it says Aquarius North Node people are here to bring in the New Age. We pick up messages from the future, as we have a way of seeing what is coming, and communicate those messages back to everyone else. If I follow a selfless path, I will have angels and support beyond my wildest dreams. I once went to a party with a good friend and a deaf comedienne with a knack for seeing auras and such, told me that she saw me coming up the drive surrounded by beautiful spirits. I can't help but think that this might be the point of my blog, to show people the future and rally for change.

So in the face of a brand new sex scandal - thank goodness, the Bush administration was a little dry in that area - I want to point out three stories from the paper that we should actually be concerned about. (By the way, I predict this girl will get a TV show from all the publicity.)

1) We're about to hit a major traffic jam in the Internet. Of course there are people who say that isn't likely, that we're improving the technology at the same rate that we're increasing demand for it, but it's not just about technology. Access requires physical and finite things like server space, power and a robust network to connect. Every day more people start using the Internet regularly and watch their first video or upload their first photo. Entire countries of people are still not on the Internet and young people are expecting in the near future to have access to all of their friends online, on video, all the time. We can bemoan the possibility of "missed opportunities" that are predicted but far more serious consequences await us as this network has become something our entire world depends on.

2) Small farmers in the United States are about to disappear forever. This is a critical issue. Mass-produced food is laden with chemicals, poisoning the animals, the earth, and us. It's devoid of nutrition, is tasteless and nearly half of it is not eaten but used as fuel so we can keep driving cars. The small farmer can't compete with the commercial farms and are selling out to developers. We're building houses and roads and gobbling all the islands of open space that dot the country. Birds that migrate thousands of miles need to stop somewhere to rest. If the islands disappear, they won't be able to rest and they'll die. Other animals will lose their habitats, migratory paths and will die or be killed trying to live in a human world. You must watch this great video about two endangered Whooping Cranes that landed on a farm in Tennessee. We apparently spent $11 million to hatch a group of them and teach them fly (most of them died but these two survived) but we can't stop developers from using up all the open space? I don't understand the logic of this!

3) 1 in every 100 adult Americans is in prison. This is the highest incarceration rate of any country at any time in history. The numbers are frightening for certain ethnicities, 1 in 35 black men is in prison. In the 1990's we passed mandatory sentencing and increased penalties for drug offenses. We had more money then and prisons were a booming business. Now they're overcrowded, crime has not gone down in response and the "drug war" is a joke. Housewives in the Midwest are getting hooked on meth cooked up in a house down the street using legal ingredients. Non-violent drunk driving offenders are mixed in the with murderers and rapists and very few people are receiving any kind of treatment. At the same time, our president is defending our right to torture to keep our country safe.

There are positive changes happening the in the world too, but even these are overshadowed by the sex scandal of a guy who stood on a soapbox for morality. Why hasn't everyone figured out yet that the people who preach morality are almost always the ones committing the offenses they so vehemently reproach?

Sometime in the next five years

Last weekend, after my haircut, I tripped into a new age shop and started looking around. I met an Astrologer with a short haircut I really liked and we got to talking about hair. I told her I was new to the city and about my barbershop experience. She had a nice face so I asked her about the Astrology readings and before I knew it, was making an appointment for a reading. I went home to unpack for a while and then headed back out to my new city for a new experience.

After generating my birth chart on the computer, Linda looked at me and said my chart suggested that I was an entrepreneur, someone who should have my own business or work for myself and that she was surprised that I had moved up here to work for eBay. I had to stifle a laugh when I heard it out loud, for some reason it sounded ridiculous that someone would go through what I just went through for a job at some generic big corporate Internet company. I told her that I would love to work for myself but I just haven’t figured out what the thing is. "You will," she said, "sometime in the next five years."

She said I had an issue with commitment because I am in constant conflict with myself. One the one hand, I want stability and need a home, I also want enormous freedom and have a need to travel. She suggested that I use home as a base instead of an anchor, and that I write down this phrase “freedom through commitment.” Committing to something doesn’t mean I can’t do the other things, she said, it just means I’m going to do that one thing fully. It made me realize, again, that in my ideal world I would travel the world, take pictures, interview people and write articles. Maybe for National Geographic, maybe just for myself.

Later when I recalled the details of a reading to some friends at a brunch, a woman I’d just met told me a story about a guy that works for her ad agency. He’s a guy, she said, who wasn’t sure what he was doing, just dabbling in graphic design and some other things. He put together a video for this job of his torso and arms walking the viewer through his world and what he does. He got the job and ended up directing the HP hands campaign based on his video resume. Now, he works part-time at one of the most prestigious ad agencies in the world and lives in his native London and wonders how the hell this all happened. The point was that you don’t need to know how to get where you’re going; you just have to do what you love.