square peg, round hole

Gigie asked how my dad was doing.  I rolled my eyes -- not nice, I know.
She said she always liked him very much, and that he was too smart for this world.  I'm not sure if that's the case but he certainly has been challenged to find his way through life on this planet.
Luckily, he played sports.  He was a very athletic person.  His all-boys prep school valued sports, Latin, math ... future doctors and lawyers.  Luckily he was good at sports?
He had a mind for art,
and absolutely no outlet for it.
His whole life has been a struggle.
He was a medic in the Vietnam War.  He would have killed himself before ever killing another person, I know it.

I took Fiona's iPhone away from her except for 1/2 hour a day. 
Someone said something to me last night about being thankful that his kids play sports, because they don't have time to get caught up in the devices.
Hmm?  (Picture a cartoon of an ostrich with its head in the sand here.)

I hear a lot about sports being the key to success ... in school and in life.
I'm happy for those team-sport people but, really?  What about those goofy Improv Club kids?  Or the ones obsessively studying Japanese cartoons and learning how to draw instead of dribble a soccer ball?  Team sports do more than provide exercise and an opportunity to learn good sportsmanship (or rage-sportsmanship as I've sometimes witnessed),  they give kids a chance to learn how to work with a group -- to be a team player.  It's an important skill.  However, not everyone is interested or able when it comes to sports.  It feels like an elitist club sometimes.
I feel very protective of the future SNL writers, filmmakers, graffiti artists, poets and rappers.

I made a game called Moksha.  This is a tiny piece of it pictured below.  You start with 1,000 seeds and as you go around the board various things in life happen, like you might become the pope, or you might dream that you shot Abraham Lincoln ... or you might step on a spider or you might live by yourself in the woods for a year.  Depending on what you do in life (the game, I mean), you add or subtract seeds.  When all the seeds are gone, you are liberated.  There's more to it but that is the gist.

I made a haiku board on a piece of sheet metal.  It's kind of buried under some dangling yarn and game cards from Moksha, but the haiku board is fun.  I'm excited to put it up.
I think my dad would have done well at the school where Fiona is right now.
Maybe it would have been enough to play sand lot baseball.
I feel like I'm getting a chance to wrap up a lot of family loose ends with the way Fiona and I live.
No one is going to bully us into conforming to a standard that works for a certain, very privileged group of people.