Bittersweet Symphony

It's a Bittersweet Symphony this life...

• I have to stop demanding that everything will fit, that the puzzle pieces are all chiseled to fit together because the world isn't a puzzle waiting to be put together 
  

Trying to make ends meet, you find some money then you die...

• Survival is our call, but through the process we try to attach a greater meaning to it all. Instead of trying to aestheticize every event in my life and force it to have a supposed meaning, I must observe the oddities of existence, the ironies that puzzle, and wonder at the questions that keep this fight for survival interesting every day. 
• I'm not just trying to preserve my life, I'm trying to preserve consciousness as well. Sometimes to preserve that consciousness, I have to search within my subconscious.

Cause I'm a million different people from one day to the next, I can't change my mold...

• Every day I change. I observe something, I experience something, I learn something. That's just another addition to the mold that I started out with. If I don't change, I don't become a million different people, I'll just be the original mold, with nothing to distinguish my pursuits in life from the rest of those around me. Strive not to be blank in the end.

Things Have changed.

I have always loved this song by Bob Dylan, "Things Have Changed."

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQDeYzUkXOU). I would embed but its intentionally disabled.

I have always loved Bob Dylan, in his many phases and I find that this song, released much much later in his life, portrays the fact that not only has Bob Dylan changed, but like everything else, our world and society is an always changing world. We cannot demand that today will be the same as yesterday, we cannot demand that Bob Dylan will be the same 22 year old folk singer at the Newport Folk Festival, that he won't grow into something bigger and deeper, something we will always puzzle at for eternity. My old friends of my youth can't demand that I will be the same child I was in high school and I can't demand that I will be the same success that I am today tomorrow. Things Have changed and will always change. That is the only thing we can demand, even though we don't demand it, it is just the only constant thing that exists.

My old room mate had a quote written in on our white board last year that will stick with me always. "The only thing of certainty in this world is uncertainty." That is what I live by and for this upcoming year, the only thing I will demand of myself is to live for tomorrow with uncertainty and learn to live without certainty because indeed I find that certainty can become the chain of your conscience.

America the beautiful, America the Brave

So I was surfing TV tonight and I came across former Senate majority leader George J. Mitchell speaking at the LA World Affairs Council about America's role as a superpower and its idealogy as one. This has been a topic on my mind for a while, especially since 9/11 and the issue has been growing in my thoughts ever since fall of last year when I took a seminar with Kantathi Suphamonkhon, the former foreign minister of Thailand. What is the United States' role in the world today? Obviously the US does not have the power it had during the Cold War, but also it goes without notice that the world is not the same as it was during the Cold War. How do we reevaluate the United States' status given the changing times and climate of our international community?

I grew up in an overly patriotic family, with a test pilot father, and a lineage of American military officers literally back to "Mad Anthony Wayne" during the Revolution. I have lived and breathed 'America' since I was born. Growing up with a Naval Officer as a father, I learned how to 'deploy' and 'retire' the colors when I was 6. We never missed a Fourth of July barbecue with the squadron and on Memorial Days, we would go out in our best Sunday attire to put flowers on the graves of my Grandparents, Great-Grandparents, and Uncle at Ft. Rosecrans Memorial Cemetery, always reliving the stories of my heritage, what brought us to the colonies, why we fought for Independence, why we went West and on in American history from there. Because of my upbringing, I have always have an ardent appreciation and love for America, its history and its ideals.

However, I have not always found it prevalent to proselytize those values to the world. American values helped the United States become what is was, prior to the Cold War and helped it rise to its peak. However, I feel that in an age when a superpower is no longer needed, America does not need to be at its peak and it doesn't need to maintain a dominance over the rest of the world in order to maintain the dogma that created it. America won't decline in value or idealogy because it has and will continue to decline in power. I find that Americans must learn to separate the values and ideology of "American democracy" from "democracy" in general. Americans did not invent the democratic republic, and they weren't the first to revolt against monarchy either. Have we forgotten the English Civil War? Also, the American Revolution was a result of a chain of events and coincidence, sparked by the European Enlightenment, that was bound to occur somewhere in the western world in the eighteenth century. Some Americans find these States to be the saviors of the world and claim to be the inventors of democracy, self-government and stability in the world when really the thirteen colonies that banded together to create the United States just filled the void of what was inevitable to come in political society during the eighteenth century.

I find that for America to continue to live as a leader in the world it no longer needs to be the stalwart economic or military power. Rather it should become the idealogical balance to this world of ever conflicting philosophies by allowing thought, and discussion to occur freely in the international arena and promote a vision of "Live and Let Live." That would forever immortalize the changes to our world that the founding fathers initiated in our revolution and in today's very different world from then, we can start an idealogical revolution, first within our own corrupt nation to begin a new Enlightenment in this modern globalized era.

Welcome

Introduction

To explain the nature of this blog, I must first describe the nature of it's author.
Patricia Wayne is an inquisitive student of life, nature and the peculiar curiosities of this world that lives in a quaint, but rather spacious apartment next to the University of California, Los Angeles. She rejoices in subtleties, and takes pleasure in the simple things: the drop of water on the counter that for some reason resembles Richard Nixon, the ability to sip her tea on campus while she watches thousands of people every day in their own unique pursuits, and the comical ironies of our political world that are so seldom enjoyed for how funny they really are. Beside her secret enjoyments, she does enjoy watching people progress. Children learning, people growing, societies building....all types of progress are beneficial in their own ways. To that progress she dedicates solemn fascination and along with her study of the intricacies of the human psyche and its many mysteries she devotes her mind's efforts to solving this mysteries and uncovering the unappreciated things in this world that we call our own.

This blog will be dedicated to Patricia's "musings" about the political world, but also about the many findings that she would call worthwhile.