Take your life, and put it in a box. Now put that box in a bigger box, mail that box to yourself and what do you have? A package and too much time on your hands.  But seriously, pack up your life and you will realize you have too much of it. You will see that life is better when you are like Cormac McCarthy: a minimalist. All you need in life can fit in a shopping cart. Just one. And yet we fill shopping carts o'er and o'er again, because like Lay's potato chips, one was ne'er enough. So here's the plan. We take this summer, and we grab what we need from it, and leave what we don't. We leave our sadness, our shoes and worries on the front porch for the boy scouts to pick up and give to Goodwill. We take sunburns, skinned knees and change.... Lots of change. Nickles, dimes, quarters, but maybe not pennies. We'll leave those on the ground because we may need to come back and pick them up for luck later. We take different change, too. We take the-last-week-of-august change. We take that because we have to, but then we turn it into an adventure. You don't have to go far for adventure. 10 blocks = adventure. So grab your novels and vintage tea set and come over 10 blocks to my new backyard. You'll see when you get here.

Latitude and Longitude

There are a few ways to look at this. There are a lot of things I could say and excuses I could make, but the longitude and latitude of it is that I wasn't who you were expecting me to be, nor were you what I was expecting.  Expectations are a funny thing. I don't know why humans expect anything anymore because it rarely happens the way we expect. It's like we feel entitled to good things, or something. Are we? Because I'm a human, does that give me the right to expect that you would be a certain way and give me certain things to make me happy? It's not selfish, really, because I tried to give you what I hoped would make you feel pleasant, and so I expected (there's that word again) the same. Well it's not that you didn't meet expectations, it's just we weren't taking the same test. You see, you were in Albania and I'm over here in Ohio. They're the same level, but there is an unexpected dichotomy of an ocean to pass. Well, thank goodness for modern transportation. You fly out half-way, and I'll come meet you in the air. We'll jump out an land on our feet on an island in the middle of that ocean I didn't like and eat bananas. It might be paradise.

The Human Library Card

This summer is like a borrowed book. It's like the book you let me borrow, actually. I only have it for a brief time, I knew that from the outset.
I still took it though, knowing that I have to give it back eventually, that it can't be mine forever; not tangibly, anyway.
I can still take the letters off the page and churn them into my mind, so that what I can't hold in the physical, I can hold in my mind.... convert it into plasma, energy, synapsis, so that it lasts forever.
See, this book, "The World's Greatest Salesman".... It's inspiring, right? Well, you are inspiring too.
See? This summer is like a borrowed book.
See, this book, "The World's Greatest Salesman".... It's deep, right? Well, you are profound.
See? This summer is like a borrowed book.
See, when you gave me that book, you gave me a little part of yourself you didn't know about.
See, those underlined words you forgot were there was a little chink of yourself that I got to taste.
See? You are the book, and I borrowed you for a summer.
But don't worry. I will give you back in the fall.