Ravings of a Random Mind...

Summertime was always my favourite season. Specifically, the beginning of summer, when the world is just starting to really warm up, and the whole summer lies before you, ripening with possibility. Opportunities abound, nothing is planned, and everyone is drunk with freedom. My birthday is at the beginning of summer, which adds to the festive atmosphere; like I get to kick off the summer celebrating my life, and then get to go out and live it.  This summer is different. This summer I turn 38. This summer I am single, again. I have been single now for three weeks. Three very long weeks. It isn't that I am not used to breakups. This one is different. For whatever reason, this is the first time that when it ended, whether by me or him, this is the first time that I wasn't able to turn around, walk away, and move on. This is the first time I have been haunted by the ghost of him.  This is the first summer where I am not excited by the possibilities that lie ahead, because I am stil

The idea of this was that it would be written more as prose, but that it should be read more as poetry. As such, some of it is symbolic, a bit disjointed, sort of stream-of-consciousness. _______________________________________________ The other day I was walking past the University commons, and I thought about what might have been. How much I miss you, and how I would have done things differently if I had them to do again. The different choices I would make to keep you from leaving. I kept going back further and further, changing the timeline again and again, until I got to the point where we met... and I kept going. How different our lives would have been if I could go way back, back before we were both damaged by those we'd been with before we met. I went all the way back to my High School graduation, these 20 years gone. If I had gone to NKU right out of school, and known what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, instead of allowing others to dictate to me what I should be

I do not believe in Perfection; in fact, I firmly believe in Imperfection. Not as a goal to achieve, but as a reality of the world in which we live. No one, and nothing, is ever going to be perfect. This is not to say that one should not strive to better one's self; quite the contrary. One should always seek to improve one's self. Not to be perfect, but to be a better version of one's self than previous. In Judaism, we have 613 Mitzvot (commandments). Basically, every time in the Torah (the first 5 books of the Bible - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Numbers) where the text reads "...and G-d said 'Do ______'", or "...G-d said, 'Do Not _____'", that is a Mitzvah - "Commanded by G-d" - to do, or to avoid doing these things. It is quite impossible to do all of them, especially as a great number of them deal specifically with rituals to be performed only by the High Priest in the Temple in Jerusalem. These Temple ritual