Middle school- 7th or 8th grade. The big song right then was Janet Jackson’s “Everywhere”. We’d hang outside around a picnic bench at lunch, singing it aloud. I liked it enough- or maybe it was the Backstreet Boys’ ‘As Long As You Love Me’, because it certainly wasn’t ‘Mm-Bop’ or anything else on the tape- to beg my sister to order the ‘Now’ cassette tape. My parents wouldn’t buy anything through 1-800 numbers, but my sister would.

I found the cassette tape on the living room floor this afternoon. So I’ve left the calming strains of Secret Garden and one of my flamenco CDs for Janet Jackson. It’s oddly uplifting- not so odd, I suppose, since the message is that the ones you love will always be with you. But it’s doing more to calm me than the lutes or flamenco guitars.

My goal is to finish the packing today so I have tomorrow free to spend with my parents. I may actually achieve that goal… it’s going pretty well. Or at least, I’ve decided it’s going better than it looks! I’m hopefully learning from my mistakes… at least I’ll never try packing with duct tape again. I thought duct tape was good for everything!

John made a comment to me earlier by email that got me thinking about taking more responsibility for driving my own initiative. As I’ve said before, I have these dreams and I want to achieve them. I think the step now is to push myself to not be too patient. That’s an odd thing to say, since I’m not a very patient person. But I’ve been lucky enough to have always been met halfway by opportunity- I would get myself the internship, but the internship would offer me the job. Now I need to push farther. Ron commented last week that if we waited for the money, we’d never do the programs- so he stopped waiting for the money and did the program without it. I’d like to maintain enough flexibility to take surprise opportunities- but it’s time to make more of my own, and to take them farther than I ever did before.