Pacifica, sunset, watching waves 

It's been a long time, but as I said in the Sept. 30th entry, "How can something in a romance novel actually happen to people in real life?"

I've always believed in love at first sight. If the idea exists, then it must have happened to someone, at sometime.

If I've experienced it at some time, I've been corrected. Or I've lived it through to what it was supposed to be.

All the experiences I've had in my 'love life', in my short 25 years, have made me the person that I am in love.

Feeling that real connection, and not just the imagined one, can change a person's life.

I don't care who reads this. I want everyone I've ever chosen to give a piece of my heart to know that you have taught me how to believe in myself; sweatpants and no makeup not withstanding. If I'm beautiful without mascara, naked, just out of a shower, with no push-up bra, or control top panties, I'm a happy woman,
I'm happy that when I step out of the shower, and I'm completely naked, putting on lotion (becuase although I don't care about people's opinions of my skin, I still don't like flaky skin for myself), I like the size of my breasts. I like the flatness of my abdominal muscles. I appreciate the sit-ups I have done to create the three faint lines on each side of my abdomen.

My mother and all of her genetic counterparts have what is lovingly referred to as a "FUPA" (for those of you not inclined to the acronym part of life, FUPA stands for FatUpperPussyArea.) Thankfully, I am adopted and don't have any of the genetic disorders of my parents. As much as I love them, my Dad's family has extremely large noses, and ears. My Mom's family has FUPAs and general wieght gain after child birth or if you're a guy, a over-all girth-ness.

Only in America can an Irish-family girl and an English/Israeli guy get together and procreate.

Maybe she thought he loved her. She was seventeen/eighteen; what was she supposed to think? He was a couple of years older, she was taller than him and willing to give it up. The latter part of the last statement probably being the more important of the two.

I've talked to other adopted people. I've learned about their experiences. I've gotten to know a girl who has given up three of her children for adoption, to the same family at different times. I've heard her feelings about giving her children up. Granted, until I supported her in her (assistant manager) position at a Blockbuster, I doubt that anyone really believed in her as a person. She was a crank addict. She just happened to be pro-life. I also gave her a whole bunch of books, including "Pride and Predjudice", "1984", "Brave New World", "Crime and Punishment", and even a copy of "The Red Tent." When I first moved up to San Francisco, I talked to her regularly on the phone. Many times about the books that I had lent her.
I gave them to her knowing that I'd never see them again.
If I improved her life in the least bit, I'm happy.
When people ask me how I am, amd I tell them "Excellent as always!" Sometimes I hear, "Are you really always 'excellent'?
I'm alive to tell them that I'm excellent. Isn't that enough?
No matter what's going on in my personal life, I can retreat into my work. No matter what's going on in my professional life, I can retreat into my personal life.
I'm living the 'American Dream'!
Aren't the people in one's life more important than the 'paper'?
If you can provide for your prodgeny, isn't that your real job? Does it matter that you've just turned 21, or that you just adopted a child at 40, or that you're having your married boss' child?
The future of our world depends on what we teach our children. Are we going to teach them to hate people that are different from them? Are we going to teach them that those who don't believe the same as we do are 'wrong'?
Or are we going to teach them that, no matter the cost, ignorance and intolerance are the most evil two words in our vocabulary. Not TERRORISM, not SUICIDE BOMBINGS. I lived through 9/11. In fact, you can look back through my archives and see I commented on the experience. I have on video a musical dance number from the movie "Godspell", (featuring the father character on ALIAS [Vincent Garber].) On 9/11 I brought home the video "A Knight's Tale" thinking that a good mid-eval story where the Knight in question was played by a very hot Australian would take our minds off the proceedings of the day. The first movie preview showcased was the new 'Spiderman' trailer. It had been sent out to theaters and movie rental warehouses all over the US. It featured a bank-heist that Spider-man foiled by trapping their escape helecopter in his web, located between the two World Trade Center Towers.
What a buzz kill. Waking up that moring to surreal images of the first building being hit, then seeing the second building, Pentagon, and downed flight in Pennsylvania. Then seeing on live television the buildings collapsing, and people running from the implosion.
All the Firefighters that everyday risk their lives for us, finally getting the respect and support that they deserve. All the police officers that have given us citizens a million DUI indictments.
I stopped hating paying taxes for them. I started wondering what my 'President' (I put that in quotes because I don't believe GWB won it in the first place, although I will conceed that he won the popular vote in the 2004 vote [thank GOD, he can't run again in 2008]) would do with the budget surplus.
If I were in control of the government, I would ask the tax-payers what they want their money spent on.
I have read the Federalist Papers, at least the important ones.
I have been to the Gettysburg battlefield.
I have seen Custer's Last Stand.

The idea of the original 'Founding Fathers' wasn't to limit the intelligent. It was to make up for the followers. If those truly trained at Yale, Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, Duke, Notre Dame, MIT, UCLA, UCBerkely, agreed with the policy that "God is behind us!", I would question how many of these graduates read "The Onion".

I know its just a matter of time, that these old land holders, and old CEOs waiting for triple-bypass surgery and cryo-genics, give way to the younger new-millenium children. Our names aren't steeped in drug culture like the thinkers of the eighties, who were mixed in with the reactionaries. Our names are Doug, Melissa, Sharon, Dave, Jennifer, Jason, Christina, Joseph, Nicole, Long, Sherwin, Kyle, Shane, Sean, Michael, Elizabeth, and Alexis. Are we that different from those revolutionaries in Russia in 1917? Yes. We are.
Somewhere along the line, someone thought that all of us, weren't worth anything.
At some point, our parents will be relying on our own generosity, to help them through old-age. Social Security isn't going to last forever. Have our parents properly prepared? If they haven't, have you started an independent savings account for them? Becuase it's going to fall upon you, to take care of them. That or the tax-payer. I pay taxes, I also save for a personal retirement account. I also allow an old job to continue to put money into a stock account for my retirement. I put part of my salary in every year. I also make sure I have $2000 for my IRA every year.

Most of my friends that are my age(25) have thousands of dollars worth of student loans, and topping that off, credit card debt.

I have neither. I will have to force any man I ever marry to sign a pre-nuptual agreement. It is very important for me to keep what property my ancestors left my family, in that family that I was welcomed into. Maybe I'm not blood, but I am the last true Eckart, raised by the last true male Eckart and if you count that my Dad's younger sister had no children so I am also her heir, and I learned a lot about life in San Francisco by living with her for a few months.
I have often contemplated that if I ever marry, and have a male child, I will ask him at an appropirate age if he will take the Eckart name on with him, and take all that that family can give. Because I am the seventh grandchild (my birthday also being on a 7) and the youngest, I feel like I had some serious pull with the 'Grand-Parents'. When my Grandpa died, I understood death as a part of life, and always thought that he would be with me. When my Grandmother on my Dad's side died, she had been suffering under the influence of Alzheimer's, and didn't even have a clue to who I was, let alone her only son, my Dad.
I'm all for stem-cell research, if Alzheimer's is hereditary, if we can find a way to prevent it, let's do it.
I'm Pro-life. I believe that when a sperm and an egg come together and start to form cellular tissue, a life is formed. I wouldn't be here if my birth mother hadn't chosen to keep her embryo to term. Hadn't gone through morning sickness, breast tenderness, wieght gain, inability to hold on to one's bladder. Thank GOD for that. I don't know why God is, but thanks, btw.
There are a lot of people who don't see it like I do. I see why they don't see it like I do. I know that it's their own life that has made them believe what they do. And I don't hold it against them. If they choose to abort, the embryo or fetus should be kept for scientific research, because if a life is as I believe, that soul will be happy that the conscious that it embodies for just a month or two is worth something.
Sometimes it's not the right time for that soul to fully emerge. In the past, hundreds of women died in childbirth, without wanting to.
Who am I to judge your decisions? I am but a blip on the Earth population record. My average life span is eighty, I'm 25 now. I have five and a half decades left.
Philisophically, I've gone to another plateau completely.
But back to my grand-parents, they went to Europe didn't they? They sent the woman who raised me as her daughter to live in Germany, because that was her choice. She wanted to learn about the world. She wanted to experience life outside of Seattle in the early Sixties. The fact that my parents most mimicked THEIR own experience of love, is amazing. They didn't listen to the old world ideas, and they didn't listen to the contemproary wisdom. They listened to themselves, and that, I think has made all the difference. Not the path not taken, although I have traveled down it a time or two, as did both of my parents, but it's the coming out the other side of the tunnel that I really feel has made their lives the stuff of legends.
Not just through their prodgeny, but through their own lives.

Someday I will record their stories, or I'll make them up.
Who knows. I try to ask my mom about her paramours during her time in Germany, but of course, we'll never know what the previous generation really has to say.

Could you imagine the argument for naming me when my parents first found out they were going to adopt a seven-day old girl child? My Dad's name is Elmer Francis, and my Mom's name was Jolita {which my Grandmother got from a character in an old radio show, back in 1938, it's true origination is a mystery, but it helps with the telemarketers; they always ask for {Ho-lita} pronouncing the 'J' as if it were an 'h' in most of the Spanish/Latin languages.}

Aren't all relationships at some point in life the only relationship you'll (whomever you are) ever have? It will last forever and ever, won't it? And don't we believe that the sun will rise upon our own loves, sweatpants, and no makeup, it doesn't matter.

So thank you love, for all you've loved about me.
My intelligence, my curiosity, my integrity, my caring, and my realness. Becuase I've never been as real or honest as I've been with you.
At least for the past three years.

;)