Comfortable in my own skin

Well, life is good and it's not and sometimes it's hot and today it's raining.

Happy in my own skin seems to be the order of the day. I used that expression last night in class, and it seemed to resonate with the professor. I guess folksy talk isn't normally heard in a graduate studies classroom, but I was using it to describe Jay Gatsby, or rather how the Great One wasn't. Comfortable in his own skin, that is.

One of the greatest lessons I've learned in my lifetime is how to say no. Or walk away from something or someone. I was a yes-man for years, not in the bootlicker kind of way, but I rarely said no to anyone and eventually you see that you're getting taken advantage more often than not.

Now I'm going to point you over to two posts that I've written most recently over at gather.com. It's a cute little endeavor over there, but numbers are taking a front seat to quality, and that never sets well with me, especially when it comes to slacking off when it comes to writing. It's all about SEO and Google, and money, of course.

(Maybe, for full disclosure, I should say that the the literature course that is currently occupying my mind is called the literature of the American counter-culture. Never before has the American Dream been on the retreat as it is now in the United States, and big changes are in the wind. Money--or our incessant, 24/7 desire for it--has got to have a cap on it...like that oil well in the Gulf. And I guess capping our desires is going to prove as difficult as the oil well.)

Anyway, check out what I had to say about a viral video, and my response for what gets passed off as a news story on gather.com.