if you ask someone what life will be like a decade from now, most of us would answer that it will be quite similar to today. they would imagine an older self, in the same house, similar friends in a similar setting. in actuality it will change quite dramatically. high chances are our friends will have changed, our jobs are likely to be different as will our home and location of where it is. if you have kids, they will be grown up or at least act unlike they do today. and your relationship with them will have also evolved. the shows we watch, your wealth and your health will also be different. we don’t think this was because we view time in a very linear way. things are strung together, like a film in slow motion we simply arrive at a point and our past is brought forward. things do not change that much in our perception, but if you write down on a piece of paper how you feel, what you have and where you are in life and tuck it into a book somewhere, chances our high that you will be surprised when you go to open it in a decade. its all changing all the time, more dramatically then we tend to accept.

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at dinner the other day a friend of mines kid sat beside him and harassed his father. he was a ten year-old grammar nazi and poked fun at his fathers english (he is not native) and pointed out to the table the sweat marks under his fathers arms. it went on and on until the boy got bored and his attention drifted to some other activity. it reminded me of why one kid, or no kid, is the way to go. besides the out of control population problem of today, having children can be a curse. you spend dearly on them, in both time and money, and the end result is far from guaranteed. they expect things from you and  blame you if anything should go wrong. we spend our time grooming them, nurturing them for the future and most of the time our effort falls short of what results we want. there is a strange resentment to being born that is under the surface that is almost biblical in its raw form and if they have siblings another sort of rivalry forms that has other relations to the scripture. ungrateful and costly, the happiness they bring might even-out in the end but the ridicule and responsibility of it all is hard to justify.

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spinning around, a dot in time or a frog in a well. i croak louder to be heard.
in my mind i am the center, but i look around and they are all yelling. they are all central.
i gather my area, collecting my things and calling it my own.
counting my things as a scorecard to a game with no rules and our own playbook.

smiling on the outside, we let others perceive the opposite.
calm and cool, it is a game that has consequences but only to those that are old enough to care.
the ego kills it all. knowing is like peaking behind the curtain, revealing the slight of hand.
the bread collapses. the dreamer wakes up.

time goes on, the game changes.
lost again in the bright lights of the stars and the enchanting dreams of the commercials.
pushing forward we buy a new outfit and smile and put out our hand.
have we simply just shifted our attention to another angle in the well and if we did does it matter?