This isn't going to be so much a normal blog for me...not what you all are used to.  I just really wanted to use this platform to make a recommendation on how to do more good this holiday shopping season.  With money so tight, gift-giving between adults may be on the decrease.  My regular family will not be exchanging gifts per se, although my chosen family has decided to draw names.  This is a cool thing and lots of families do this for adults. 

What I have been doing is hitting the local thrift stores.  I've also been looking for a small desk and chest of drawers for myself and dont want to pay full price for something new.  I was amazed at the high quality of goods at these shops, and was shocked further as a friend and I started making the rounds last weekend.  Every one of the shops we went to supported local charities right here where I live.  Salvation Army, Hubbard House, Humane Society, Goodwill, Hospice of Northeast Florida, Angel Aide....all of these organizations run amazing thrift stores in which the proceeds go to helping run the charities here in my community.  One of my favorite purchases so far (again, for myself, haha) was a rechargeable battery operated screw driver that also had a full set of sockets that would fit on the driver as well.  It was marked $7.99 and my friend kept telling me that it might not work, I might want to get one new, etc.  So we plugged it in to the wall to make sure the charger worked, and it had a partial charge already.  The bits and sockets fit just fine.  I could spend $7.99 on this.  So when I got to the check-out, the VERY pleasant cashier man remarked that the price tag was white....and that meant that on THAT day, I got 50% off the white tagged items!  So I only paid $3.99 for this whole set!  WOW!  My friend also found a jacket and some warm hats that we are going to give to a homeless man who is living in the woods.  Most jackets are only about $4, definitely less than $10.  I bought some clothes hangers too, that I couldn't find at Target or KMart. 

And speaking of KMart, they are one of the only major-ish retail stores who tend to stock American-made products.  One thing I have been looking all over for is the canvas totes (or even unwoven polypropelene totes) that people are taking into the grocery stores to bag their groceries here.  EVERYONE seems to be using them.  Publix sells their unwoven poly bags for only .99cents, but they are made in China.  I want to buy some that are made in America, so I am supporting American jobs and American workers.  China does not need any more of my money (why I don't shop at Wal Mart).  But every single bag I found at KMart was also made in China.  Even Envirosacks online has an item in the FAQ about why they manufacture their bags in China.  SAD....

Anyway, my point is to please shop with a conscience this year.  Think about what your dollars are supporting,  If you HAVE to buy foreign made items, buy them second hand from a place where your dollars will also support a charity in your community.  (There were some AMAZING laptop cases for $2 in one thrift shop!)  Look in your phone book and see what kind of shops are in your area!  You could give two gifts for the price of one.

After a few rounds of emails and phone tag, we were able to settle on a date for me to appear on live television.  I didn’t have anything to wear, my hair was still suffering from my home coloring treatments in which I missed entire handfuls of hair when applying the color, and I didn’t really have anything prepared to say.  The worst thing perhaps was my utter and complete inability to find my way from point A to point B without live technical support.  My total lack of direction is legendary, as its been proven time and again in this blog (although those bits are really just the tip of the iceberg in reality).  I managed to find a nice sweater to wear that was Isara blue and went nicely with a pair of dark brown dress slacks I bought not long before leaving for Nong Khai, but were now too big in some weird places.  I dealt with my hair, re-colored it and had a nice long talk with the blow dryer, hot iron, and anti-frizz goop.  All was well.  Now all I needed were good directions telling me how to find the station.  Guess I should have done that drive-by I had planned to take before The Big Day.

On the morning of the interview, I had the tv on in the bedroom as I was getting ready in the bathroom.  I had the volume up so I could keep track of traffic reports and such that might hinder my trip.  I was not nervous in the least bit.  UNTIL.  Until I was staring at my make-up free face in the mirror as I heard one of the co-anchors give the teaser “After losing her job, one local woman decides to pack it all up and head to Thailand with her children.  Find out why, coming up.”  Then I panicked.  He’s talking about me being on the air and here I was, wet hair, no make-up, maybe needing to iron something, and I still had to get lost on the way.  What was I thinking?!  I should be walking out the door in twenty minutes!  OMG!  So the make-up was applied a la Jackson Pollock, my hair looked like something left over from Fright Night (suddenly, the hair dryer, hot iron and goop were no longer on speaking terms…FINE!), and between my spritz of perfume and liberal application of Static Guard, I smelled like I had been sprayed by every tom cat in town.  I quickly grabbed my google.maps directions and I flew out the door and hit the road.  Might I just say right here, one of the first things to be purged from the memory banks when you stop working for any length of time is the absolute horror that is Monday Morning Traffic.

It was awful. I was supposed to be at the station in two minutes and I was still fighting to get on the interstate.  My Pollock masterpiece was melting away under stress-sweat.  And because I had just had my car’s headliner replaced the day before, the inside of my car smelled heavily of glue and adhesive.  I had to roll the window down.  POOF goes the already fragile peace treaty I had brokered with my hair.  I called my daughter, who never fails to calm me down when I am reaching critical mass.  When I told her of my current status of stuck in traffic, bad hair, bad smell, crazy make-up, she actually chastised me for not leaving sooner.  When did she grow up to make sense like that? 

I finally made it downtown-ish.  I followed the directions verbatim.  And once again, I found myself launched into the unknown.  I was driving along with the directions intact and suddenly, it was like being launched off Niagra Falls or stepping into the Twilight Zone.  One second I’m on the map, and the next I might as well have teleported to Cincinnati.  I was lost.  Luckily, I found the station’s phone number in my call history on my cell phone and a Nice Young Man, using sophisticated triangulation techniques (where are you right now?  What are you looking at?  What is directly in front of your face, woman?!), was finally able to talk me down from the ledge and get me to where I needed to be.  After arriving in the station parking lot, I threw my phone down on the floorboard and hurried out of the car.  The Nice Young Man was standing outside waiting on me (prob thinking he doesn’t get paid enough to deal with the likes of me, haha!).

Once inside, the news anchor I had been conversing with all along was rounding the corner, also wondering where I was.  She was a blur of “hello, nice to meet you, we’ll be with you in a few minutes”.  I stayed focused on the NYM who was quickly leading me through a door marked The Morning Show where portions of the broadcast were taking place.  The only thing I can liken the experience up to that point to is when I went into labor with my daughter twenty years ago.  I lived at the beach at the time (same as now) and we had to drive like crazy to get downtown (same as now) while I was half dressed and had bad hair (same as now), was met outside by a NYM who calmly ushered me to where I needed to be (same as now), to sit and wait for the doctor while I tried not to have a cow (same as now).  There was also the remarkably identical sense of “even if I wanted to cancel this gig, its simply too late to go there”.

Everybody was super nice, a few people I usually see only a foot or so tall on my little tv screen were suddenly life-sized and shaking my hand, introducing themselves.  I sneaked a peak at the weather man doing his greenscreen thing in the next room.  And I was blown away at how thin all the anchor women were.  I suddenly felt like a sasquatch dressed up in people clothes.  Oh well.  Still not nervous.  Just had the sense of being at the point of no return.  Soon, I was mic’d up and led to the comfy couch with the coffee table and huge cups sans coffee.  The anchor sat next to me, put me further at ease, told me to just look at her during the interview, and then it happened.  The camera guy who had helped me with my mic says “ten seconds”.  I felt a cloudy transparency slip over my brain cells.  While I was telling myself to stay focused and alert, my brain went into self-preservation mode and started doing the most stupid thing.  I looked at the anchor’s blouse collar and casually debated in my own head whether it was white, or bone, or maybe even a light taupe.  And like a voice coming louder through a fog, I started to hear the anchor speaking to me again.  And the first word I latched onto was the way she pronounced “Isara”.  I spoke it back to her with the Thai inflection and told her it meant Freedom in English…and all was well after that.  I had my four minutes of fame (do they owe me eleven more minutes?), talked about Gik and Guk, and how Kirk cleaned out that trashy ditch, scholarships, the ILC….we fit a lot into the time we had on air.  Then it was over.  Just like that.

I went out to my car feeling pretty good, was letting the adrenaline works itself out, and reached for my phone to call my daughter.  I was dying to know how bad I looked on tv.  I had a text message, and it was from her.  Did it say “Good job, mom!” or “I’m proud of you!” ?  Why, no.  It said THIS:

After I regained consciousness, I called her, hardly able to breathe.  It took me a full five minutes (longer than my entire interview) to get her to admit that she was joking!  She really had me going, telling me it was on my left nostril, being very specific.  I can cross a few more years off my life thanks to her.  And I am going to believe that she was telling the truth when she said she was lying.

A goal is an intriguing creature. In a way, it is much like a human, in that it changes with age and eventually dies after becoming weaker and weaker in its last few moments. It is true that some goals never die, that some become fulfilled and some fight up until their human counterparts can no more. The former example is rare, as it takes a lot of hard work to fulfill a goal. And, in a way, the latter example is moot because one could argue that it does, eventually, die. The point is, if we built cemeteries for goals, they would fast become full and crimes like recycling burial sites would occur sooner and more frequently than in human resting places. But it is unfair to talk about goals dying as if they have a choice because, much like how goals are similar to human beings, they are also, very much, at our mercy.

If you ask the students in a third-grade class what their biggest goals in life are, your results will be soaked in hope and fantasy; so saturated, in fact, that it is almost tragic - but it's not, it's wonderful. The naivety and sheer joy those children have gives truth to the statement "ignorance is bliss," because it is. "I want to be a princess," one girl might say, or "I want to fly an airplane," might escape the heart of some young boy. The level of optimism is astounding, but what is truly tragic is watching it deteriorate overtime. If you were to, for example, pose those children that same question every ten years, you would see how goals and dreams age as people do - as they become more rational, as their minds are further polluted. That little girl at age eighteen no longer strives to be a princess in a flowing pink dress, she just wants to find the man of her dreams. And that little boy, when he turns twenty-eight, won't be worried about modes of transportation, he will be worried about trying tom pay to go back to college to support himself, his girlfriend and their unborn baby. When those students are thirty-eight and forty-eight, the will only desire to someday watch their children get married and have kids of their own. When they're fifty-eight and sixty-right, they will want to move closer to their grandkids, they will hope to leave their jobs at Sears or Target to take up boat-building, writing that novel or opening their own business. And when they are seventy-eight and eighty-eight they will hope to remain healthy and they will hope that they won't have to ask for Social Security checks anytime soon.

Hopes change overtime, just like people, with people. When one sets a goal, it is up to him to fulfill it. When it goes unsatisfied, it is up to him to find a new, more attainable, dream. And when his life is nearly over, it is hoped that he can look back with little to no regrets, and know that he did the best he could with what he had. He may have never flown that plane, but he has three beautiful great grand-daughters and a little shop of his own. He can kiss his wife every morning and he has a rood over his head.