Tag: thoughts

Love

Posted on by Paul In The Buff

I want to inspire you.

I want to sing with you.

I want to be your foundation.

I want to fly kites with you.

I want to pin you to a wall and kiss you until our lips are sore.

I want to cook breakfast for you.

I want I want to watch movies with you, then have to watch them again another night because we spent more time making out than watching.

I want to go kayaking with you.

I want hold you and listen to a thunder storm.

I want to run with you in the rain.

I want to lay with you in a warm, summer field.

I want to be all nerdy with you and talk about science.

I want to text you until 2AM when were apart.

I want to feel your touch.

I want to feel your breath on my neck.

I want to feel your weight on top of me.

I want to go shopping with you and make everyone in Wegman's laugh with us.

I want to teach you how to throw boomerangs.

I want you to never stop wanting to love me.

Hailey’s Comet

Posted on by Paul In The Buff

Crystal blue skies hide
Dots of light that can only be seen
When skies illuminate a darker side
And the lace made of silvery threads
Pull away this higher tide

She yearns through the eons
By a gravity unknown
Cold and empty space she feels
Hearts once tied, no longer sewn
To these new gravities
Her pull has grown

In my sight, her tale spun
A trail grown long
By an ultra violet sun
To move and to sway
Dressed in tangled strands
To drift away
Through the fingers of God’s hands

Beyond the heavenly freedom
Feathery shapeless beds
Beyond the full moon glow
Lace of silvery threads
Beyond the confines
Of these lives we’ve led

Still on she travels
Through a distance that yawns
This desire she wants
The place where she belongs

Perhaps all she desires
Is to end this flight
Falling back to the sun
On some cold lonely night
And be loved every day
Shining so warm and bright

Or maybe she wishes
For the moon instead
And lay every night
In heaven’s feathery bed
Feeling a touch and a kiss
Dressed in lace and silvery thread
Held tight by these arms
Like the stories she’s read

But what to be had?

Still her tangled strands flow
Celestial beauty
A life time of days below
Separated by mystery
Leaving her legend to grow

And only once in a life
Will I find this grace
Of such beauty in flight
In my life of empty space

I will pray to find
An immortality to bind
For many lives to live
And survive a godly kind
Wasting away the eons
For once each lifetime
Just to find her grace
When she returns
From a prison of empty space

Champions

Posted on by Paul In The Buff

My soccer team won our division championship tonight with a 2-1 win against a very, very tough team.

I'm so proud of these kids.

We were not at all the most talented team, but as the season progressed they embraced the lessons I was teaching:

1. Focus on the fundamentals.
2. Play within yourself.
3. Keep everything to the outside until you can strike.
4. Have fun and be a good sport.
5. Being a good sport doesn't mean allowing them to push you around - stand your ground, play with pride and give it your best effort, always.
6. Team first. No one can do it all on their own. Trust your team mates, always.

They did just that, every game down the stretch of the season and finished their last 8 games, including the playoffs 6-0-2, after starting 5-5 with some pretty discouraging losses.

This was the end of an exciting season for them. I'm happy we were able to make this happen.

In two weeks we'll have our season wrap-up and pizza party. After that, most of these kids I will probably never coach again. That's just the way it goes.

But I hope they take the excitement of this season, and the lessons they embraced, and never, ever stop playing, growing and learning.

Career Counseling

Posted on by Paul In The Buff

From July 1, 2008. Another trip to work at the Cleveland VA Hospital, which had to be one of the most depressing and horrible jobs I had done in my years of traveling IT and Project Management.

Mainly, it was government work. No one seemed to care if anything got done, yet complained mercilessly if something didn't work. A contradiction, for sure. But I had a lot of time to talk to the staff and the patients....

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Another Day at a VA.

Days like this frustrate me like no other. An early morning drive to get to a job site to sit around, solve simple issues and basically waste a whole lot of time.

A day of nothing.

It is simply intolerable to me. I feel sucked into this government work mentality… nothing to do? Why do anything? Might as well nap at the desk.

Screw that.

I have too much to do. Unfortunately most of it is at home, in my office. Not here. Not in Cleveland.

I hate clock watching. I hate feeling like I’m trapped and can’t make good use of my time. I hate sitting here thinking about everything that needs to be done, or how much smoother the day would go if only I were in my office helping out where actual work is being done.

Stuck.

No internet, because it’s a VA.

In the interior of the hospital so my cell reception is terrible.

Watching these government workers that OUR TAX DOLLARS are used to pay their salaries spend half of their day doing absolutely nothing and prefer it that way.

Infuriating.

The only time I felt of any use today was helping an elderly man who fell out of his wheelchair while I was on the phone in the lobby.

I’m stationed in this cubicle just waiting for something to happen. Anything. One nurse keeps coming in to ask me if starting a career in Healthcare Informatics would be a good idea.

“You have a degree in nursing?” I asked.

“Yeah…”

“Are you not enjoying nursing?”

“Oh, no! I love it. This is the first time in my life I have a job that I really love!”

She seemed pretty positive about her job...

“Then why do you want to change to Healthcare Informatics?”

“Well, the money.”

“Ok.”

I figured as much.

“Is Healthcare Informatics similar to what you do?” she asked.

“Not quite, but HCI could encompass a lot of things. Mostly though, it’s information management. A lot of database management, dealing with HIPAA compliance issues, maybe even loading and setting up desktop PC’s around the hospital.”

“Ok, ok.”

“I’m not a career counselor, but I can say this; finding a job you really love these days is difficult. If you love your job, the enjoyment of doing something you love might be worth a lot more in the long run that making a few extra dollars.”

I don't know, would you rather take care of patients all day or stare at database queries and tables all day? To have a career that pays ok is one thing – to do something that you love is something completely different. If you’re not loving nursing, then go for it! If you’re ok with nursing and you’re one of those people who swear at their computer every time a dialogue box pops up, you might want to stick with nursing.

Do you want to clean poop off of elderly people or get berated by people every time windows blue-screens like you did it to them as a personal vendetta?

One thing is for sure; if she thinks a career in IT means getting paid to sit in front of a computer all day chatting on IM’s and Facebook, she hasn’t looked into it very much. She’s never built a server rack, or worse, a battery back-up rack! She’s never had to squeeze into a crawl space to pull new network lines and get trapped with an active wasp nest. She’s never had to stand in the blast of a room-sized air-conditioning unit for hours while fixing a server in a network center. She’s never faced the horror of a failed back-up routine discovered only after a hard drive dies and takes all of its data with it. She’s never had to deal with the complaints of people who depend on “geeks” to keep their work systems functioning properly despite the ridiculous actions of software companies, constant security threats from the outside world and litany of bureaucratic nonsense IT departments have to deal with.

Sorry if I’m ranting, but the rant is keeping me awake for the moment.

It’s going on 3PM. There’s a show at the history museum down the street. I think I’m going to call it a day, grab my camera and go see it...

Going Deep

Posted on by Paul In The Buff

Our society? We allow our elderly to linger in hospital beds, fed by tubes, broken and suffering, hanging on to the unraveled and frayed threads of their life. We pump them full of medicines, hook them up to machines that will breathe for them, while we sit by their side and watch them slowly fade into death. Then we drain the blood from their bodies, fill them full of chemicals and paint their faces so they look somewhat alive for a few more days so we can watch over them in death as well. In the end, their bodies are locked into a metal box and we store them away in the ground, or in a mausoleum where whatever life giving resources that might still be in them can be forever locked away, unable to provide back to the Earth and future life.

Why?