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Dear Jack: You Graduated Pre-K!

5 years, 6 months.

Dear Jack: You Graduated Pre-K!

Dear Jack,

This past week, our family came to Rainbow Child Care Center to see you graduate Pre-K. It was a proud day for Mommy and me. I caught her holding back the tears as your name was called.

Ms. Destiny told a little bit about each Pre-K graduate. She announced to everyone that you want to become a paleontologist when you grow up.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you did. You love dinosaurs! We’ve now watched both Jurassic World and Jurassic Park together. I had wondered if certain parts of those movies would scare you.

Dear Jack: You Graduated Pre-K!

Instead, you joyfully blurted out the correct name of every dinosaur that popped up on the screen, even if you could barely see one in a shadowy corner. You were naming dinosaurs I didn’t even know existed!

You definitely weren’t scared. Instead, you were fascinated by what you saw in the movie.

In a perfect world, Mommy and I wouldn’t both have to work full time. However, one of the benefits of you sort of “growing up” in preschool is that you are now more psychologically, socially, and intellectually developed than I was by age 5 and a half.

Dear Jack: You Graduated Pre-K!

You probably know more than now than I did when I was 7 or 8.

I love your humble confidence in yourself. I love you willingness to try new adventures. I love how you are an individual.

Dear Jack: You Graduated Pre-K!

Seeing you graduate Pre-K gave me a glimpse of the boy will be in years to come. I undeniably get satisfaction as a parent knowing I have so far raised an intelligent, creative, well-behaved boy.

In just a couple of months, you’ll be starting Kindergarten. I’m not going to say the cliche thing: “I can’t believe you’re already going to be in Kindergarten.”

I can believe it.

Dear Jack: You Graduated Pre-K!

For these past 5 and a half years of your life, I have faithfully documented your life each week in my letters to you. I have watched you mature.

You’re ready for it. You’re ready for Kindergarten now.

 Love,

Daddy

Dear Jack: You Graduated Pre-K!

3 Comments Posted on Nostalgia, People, Storytelling, Uncategorized

The Replay Value of People

People will come and go, but which ones are worth bringing back out of the archives?

There are some movies I watch nearly once a month like I Love You, Man and they never get old, and they’re just as funny as the last time I watched them.  There are other movies like Deliverance, for which I got all I needed with just one viewing.  The same could be said about TV shows: Seinfeld and Friends reruns are much easier to watch for the 6th and 7th time; as for American Idol, for obvious reasons, not so much.  When it comes to “replay value”, people are the same way.

We live and work and play and hang out with some people for years, then, all of the sudden, they are no longer a part of our lives- we graduate high school or college, they decide to work somewhere else, etc.  And after they leave, when we randomly think of them, we are left with an aftertaste of what they meant to us, as a whole.  Generally positive or generally negative.  Either worth the time and effort to catch back up with, or not.

Out of the dozens of contacts in my cell phone, I only regularly talk to a handful or so.  Out of the nearly 800 facebook friends I’ve collected since March 2005, I only regularly talk to a few dozen.  Out of the people I used to work with, there is only one or two that I still keep in contact with.  By subconscious default, we ask ourselves, “Does this person have enough significance in my life to bother with talking to again, past just the ‘hi, how are you’ line?”

We make time for the people we care about, not excuses.  And I know that just as I have left certain people of my past, in the past, I am aware that there are those who view me as “non-replayable” as well.  Like when an old college friend announces that they’re coming to Nashville next weekend on their facebook status, then I send them a private message inviting them to lunch or dinner over the weekend, they ignore my message, spend the weekend in Nashville, then once they return to their hometown, announce as their facebook status, “Had a great weekend in Nashville!”

And then I say to myself, “I get it.  I’m not replayable in their life.  Noted.”  I don’t take it personally.  I may not be worth their time or effort, but I have confidence that I am worth other people’s.

Figuring out who is at all replayable in your life is kind of like going through your closet to decide which clothes you should keep and which ones you should give away.  If you won’t wear that shirt in the next year at least once, you probably won’t ever wear it.  Same thing with people in your life.  If you wouldn’t answer or return their call, or if you would never make an effort to contact them again in the future, if you don’t even find their facebook statuses to be amusing, it’s safe to say you’re just not that into them: They don’t have replay value in your life.

1 Comment Posted on Nostalgia, Storytelling, Uncategorized, Writing

The Naked in Public Dream: Subconsciously Feeling Vulnerable, Underprepared, or Inadequate

You’re not the only one.

I have a rare ability.  When in a dream that I don’t want to be in, I often can tell myself, “This is a stupid dream.  You don’t have to keep dreaming this.  Just wake up”. And I do.  I wake up.  Usually.

Waking myself up is the easy part; the hard thing to do is to realize it’s actually just a dream.  And there are two dreams in which I never seem to realize it’s all my imagination.  1) I’m back in high school or college and I’m about to graduate, then I realize I was scheduled for a class that I forgot about and never went to, meaning I can’t graduate on time.  2) I’m naked in public.

Of course, the classic “naked in public” dream is quite popular among the general population.  Supposedly the dream means the person feels vulnerable and may be afraid that everyone will see that person for their true self.

Do I feel vulnerable?  Do I feel afraid everyone will see me for my true self?

I guess if anyone might feel vulnerable it could be me, since I’ve been journaling my life on the Internet for five years now (first on MySpace, then on facebook, now on here).  That’s a vulnerable situation.  I could unintentionally offend a reader, or embarrass myself by exposing too much about my personal life.  But as far as I know, I am indeed exposing my true self to people.  If not, this whole website is a sham.

A whole website which generally 400 to 500 people a day visit.  If all my writings are written from the perspective of a person I wished I was, instead of who I really am, then I am impressed.  Because that means I am talented enough to write daily from a created character’s narrative perspective, not my own.  Like the plot of Fight Club, or the dumbed-down version: Secret Window.

While it’s easy to feel frantic in a “naked in public” dream, it’s also easy to laugh once you wake up.  Because from a logical point of view, like many dreams, the chances of the events of the dream ever happening are so impractical that they’re basically impossible.

The question I never asked myself in the naked in public dream is, most importantly, “how did I lose my clothes anyway?”

Often I am at my old elementary school (as a grown 29 year-old man).  Conveniently, no one else seems to care that I am naked, covering myself with whatever random object I can pick up off the ground.  And that’s supposed to mean that I don’t care about people seeing me for who I really am, including all my personalities.  That must be true, since I’ve written about that exact topic before in The Personality Pyramid, which is currently my 10th most popular post of the 310 on this site.

Seriously, it’s not easy to lose your close in a public place, and then have no one notice or care.  When I have these dreams, I’m not victim of violence.  I just simply flat out lost my clothes in public.

But I imagine that in real life if I ever took off my clothes (or they just took themselves off) in public, and couldn’t find new ones, I would gladly settle for one of those barrels with straps to go over my shoulders.  I always thought those looked cool.  The problem is, I only see them in caricatures or cartoons.

If I wanted to buy a wearable barrel with shoulder straps, where would I begin?

If I could get a barrel or normal clothes when naked in public, I would settle for a long black trench coat.  Because I would already be creepy for being irresponsible enough to lose my clothes in public, I might as play the full part.  Then I could only expose myself to people who deserved it:

People talking loudly in public on their Blue Tooths.

http://www.meaningofdreams.org/dream_themes/beingnakeddreams.htm