I think the more passionately you feel about your work (and hopefully, the life that work is only part of) the more it has personal meaning. Money is a trade-off, not an absolute. Recognition's nice, yet it's a sour substitute for the excitement that comes from pursuing something consuming.

Beyond that, I think the real question becomes: is your focus solely on your own navel or do you have a view that includes other people, the whole world, and even--maybe especially--that part of yourself that isn't identifiably material?

One's work should somehow be a part of one's hopefully ongoing effort to lead an integrated life of growth achieved through a blending of the mental, physical and spiritual. I believe that when you realize the ultimate goal of life, you must then find the path that leads you towards it, and that all aspects of your life should be in harmony. And isn't it lovely that some of us have the means to consider these things instead of scratching for survival!

As most of you know, I attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which, along with Stanford, is designated a "near Ivy" for many purposes, including joint admission and financial aid decisions. But the fact is that many faculty and students at Ivy league schools look at MIT as a "trade school," while many MIT people view Ivy League schools (esp. the one just up the river) as "a waste of time." Certainly, MIT made every effort to give me a practical education.

Did we go to the same university? I think MIT made every effort NOT to give us a practical education. I remember being told constantly that an MIT education taught you the fundamentals of science, engineering and humanities, rather than anything specifically applicable to today's (now yesterday's) technology, so you would be able to think critically and prepare yourself to continue learning throughout your career. Sounds similar to your definition of a liberal arts education.

In fact, I got very little practical knowledge from my classes; most of that came from WTBS and my outside jobs. Perhaps MIT's focus on problem-solving differentiates it from liberal arts schools. (Is teaching people how to solve contrived problems "practical"?) If so, learning the techniques of problem-solving was as close to practical as it got, because the problems themselves generally did not apply to the real world. When I started working I used the thought processes I had developed at MIT rather than much of anything specific from my courses.

MIT appeared to have little desire to teach anything practical. I got great grades at MIT but came out with embarrassingly poor knowledge of what the rest of the profession regards as engineering, particularly as measured by my first tries at the GRE and fundamentals of engineering (EIT) tests. It wasn't until I studied in depth for the Professional Engineer exam that I began to understand those disciplines.

I think MIT generally embodied the principles of a good liberal arts college. Actually, I would have preferred a bit more on the practical side than MIT delivered.

Some time ago, I saw a movie that in retrospect seemed too good - like I must have been in just the right mood or something, it couldn't have been as good as I was recalling.

Last night dad and I watched Smoke Signals together, the first time for him, and my recollection was right on !

I have to say that my all time favorite movie, "Harold and Maude" now has a companion - "Smoke Signals" is such a fine piece of work, a beautiful blend of meaningful story, great casting, believability and humor - a really worthwhile film, I highly recommend it. Also, for anyone with any interest in the Native American life today, the author of the film has written several books that give the reader a real opportunity to learn something about life on the "rez." Two of them by Sherman Alexie are: "First Indian On The Moon" and " The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight In Heaven."

New HTML techniques, or are you also a bombardier? ;-)

Me? I've lowered my sites.

A holiday featuring a vast amount of carbohydrates fits right in in the Czech Republic, where the basic food unit is the dumpling. You can do a lot with a dumpling -- fill it with cheese, garlic, and various meats and smother it with gravy, for example -- and whatever you do, anyone who eats a few will spend the rest of the day in a caloric torpor, occasionally belching but otherwise inert. Throw in football, and you've got the kind of afternoon any American who's endured a traditional Thanksgiving dinner would recognize.

Actually, I retain a sneaking affection for old Karl. He was such a complete scoundrel. Did you know the champion of the working class never actually worked for a living? He sponged off his bourgeois family while he bummed around Europe preaching revolution until he was thirty-one. Then the Belgians, usually an even-tempered bunch, threw him out of their country. He'd already exhausted the patience of the authorities in his native Germany and in France, so he moved to London. From then until his death thirty-four years later, he sponged off Frederick Engels. Engels, incidentally, had arranged his life rather neatly -- he earned his living oppressing millworkers at his family's textile factory in Manchester, and between times wrote books expressing his shock and horror at the oppression of millworkers.

But in fact the Paris Metro is a model for how public transport ought to run…The trains are clean and comfortable, they come along every few minutes, and breakdowns and unexplained delays are rare. Anyone who puts up with the London Underground on a daily basis would cheerfully vote for Josef Stalin if he got anything like the same performance out of the Circle Line.

… So maybe left-wingers are uniquely suited to building and running public transport systems. The best subway systems in the U.S., at least in my experience, are those in San Francisco and Washington D.C., two notorious nests of pinkos, commies, anarchists, fellow-travelers and Lord knows what else.

We both are having a hard time finding some kind of relevance to time. At this point in our lives, with all the memories, the artificiality of time really becomes apparent. I can still feel the first time I held you in my arms when you were only moments old - and that is on the continuum with the first time you brought Marlow into my room in the middle of the night, when she was ten days old. I can only look back on the different periods of my life so far, the baby years, the college years, the teaching years, the child care years, the spiritual discovery years, the writing years, and the current doldrums!! There really is no sense of time passing, just different aspects of myself. I think the aborigine lack of a sense of 'time' is the most realistic and spiritual path.

Wow ! didn't mean to go all philosophical !