Pumpkin Shells

Snake Oil Reflections

2010-04-12T18:00:00.002-07:00

The Snake Oil Salesman is arguably the first villain of capitalism. The first depiction of one was for me was the character Dr. Terminus in Walt Disney's Pete's Dragon, played by Jim Dale. He had the mustache and a shill who helped him hock his bogus wares, but he was comedic and as a child he was infinitely less scary than the other villains, the abusive Gogans, who pursued the protagonist, Elliot. I didn't really understand at the time exactly why Snake Oil Salesmen were so bad.

I remember in school when I learned about them I also learned the phrase caveat emptor (Latin for buyer beware). I was also learning about techniques of persuasion (Testimonial, Band Wagon, Peer Pressure, etc.) as part of late 1980's D.A.R.E. program. To top it off my Mom, who is very much into consumer advocacy, bought her children a subscription to “Zillions”, which was basically Consumer Reports for kids. All these things together built in me a very healthy skepticism of people who want me to buy things and their motivations.

My first sales job was as a telemarketer. I took calls for infomercials. I completed the sales and tried to up-sell the customer while I was at it, it wasn't a very difficult job. Before I worked there I was fully convinced that most of the stuff being sold through infomercials was crap that people didn't need. This job only strengthened that conviction for me. I couldn't help but feel creepy through the whole process, twirling an imaginary mustache as I told people how easy three payments of $29.99 would make their lives.

Subsequent sales jobs didn't change my feelings. It didn't help that as a christian I've been trained in anti-materialism, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal” (Mathew 6:19-20). I really enjoy transcendentalist writers like Emerson and Thoreau, who mourned the materialism of the nineteenth century (they didn't have malls back then).

Through it all I've made friends with people who really think they're helping others by selling them crap, or putting them into debt for a “good cause”. A lot of money can be made doing that. I wonder at what cost though. I can't help but feel empathy for the customer who tries to improve their like through material means. I sometimes just want to shake them and say “You're life will not get better by buying stuff,” and then collect my last paycheck from my employer.

Now I have no problem with capitalism, in general an open market seems to be the best system of economy available. But I do have a problem with how capitalism is represented as the perfect system of economy, one that makes full use of man's self-interest. The problem is that man's self-interest does not naturally sustain an open market and full disclosure; pure self-interested capitalism is not self-sustaining, as evidenced by monopolies, scams (like snake oil salesmen), and most recently the sub-prime mortgage crisis. If people can make money at the expense of someone else then they will. Not to say that all sales use unfair or underhanded business practices, but for the ones that do, I wonder how those people feel about humanity at large and their place in the human family. Are they playing the villain who thinks they're the hero?

What is fiction?

2010-02-01T18:00:00.003-07:00

After reading a great deal about fiction where literary minds try to define what fiction is in a scientific manner, as if it were some kind of natural phenomenon, I'm left greatly confused. To me fiction is, in simplest terms, a story that didn't happen. Though scholars feel a great need to build a scaffolding of terms and diagrams from which to study the subject from, I don't feel that is as helpful in the study of fiction as it is in say the study of sea anemone. Where you might easily file a creature under an invertebrate category, you may have greater difficulty filing a story between the category of short story and novella. But why is it even necessary?

The twentieth century has seen a flood of scientific practices and terminology cascade from the realm of pure science into all other kinds of disciplines. Those waves of science break against the shores of the literary world but thankfully the shores have remained relatively impenetrable. Can you really apply scientific method to literature? Can I observe stories, form a hypothesis about why they're successful, experiment with stories based on that hypothesis and then proceed to write to highly successful story? Certainly many people have tried to do that, the world is full of books and expensive lectures on how to write the great American novel, but the peer review of those methods have proven that they are not scientifically sound, they are largely not repeatable with the same results.

Either successful fiction writing is such a complex thing that scholarly minds have yet to identify all the variables in play or fiction is simply not a natural phenomenon that can be understood in scientific terms. The latter makes the most sense to me. What could be more unnatural and break all scientific laws than to create something out of nothing? And yet fiction can carry more truth than most non-fiction in the world.

There are countless examples of what fiction can do. When Jesus tells the parable of the Prodigal Son does it really matter if the son was a real person and the event actually happened? No, because it moves us and demonstrates human nature to us. An acquaintance of mine, the late Doctor Gustavo Lage, was a very accomplished psychotherapist, a Florida medical school gives an annual award in his name; after years of medical training and personally going through psychoanalysis himself, he told me that he knew nothing about psychoanalysis until he read Dostoyevsky. The teacher in a recent philosophy class told me that philosophy can only teach what a particular type of thinking is; but fiction is the realm where philosophy is applied.

Fiction is distinctly human. Man has been telling stories since before the beginning of recorded time. What makes a story good or what makes a story bad, that's all debatable and often is. But fiction itself remains simple and immutable: the story that didn't happen, the unproven tale, the imagination, the dream. Despite all our rational and scientific minds tell us, if we reject the fictitious story we reject one of the most useful and well used tools humanity has ever had. We can debate about how and why fiction is so powerful but those things are as different as the individuals who read and write fiction. For better or for worse, fiction simply is and forever will be fiction.

Zombies!!!

2010-01-25T18:00:00.003-07:00

No monster better encapsulates the fears of the twenty-first century than the zombie. We're not afraid of the half-animal half-man that preys on us from the impenetrable forest, otherwise we'd have 'Werewolf Week' on the Discovery channel. Vampires too are no longer the foreign nocturnal monsters who seduce and steal our women away, now they sparkle, take our daughters to prom and marry them before 'biting' them and having a family. These classic monsters don't scare us anymore, but the zombie does.

In the world in which we live, where swine flu breaks out and takes over the world, the idea of plague still scares us. We see the fruits of extremism, where suicide bombers mindlessly seek destruction. Consumerism is rampant, people sell and are sold 'stuff' in an effort to find happiness. Things move so fast that people don't have time to stop and think where this is all going. In our post-God society we see humanity as just an animal, a documented lump of interconnected biology, a brain whose inter-workings are no longer a mystery, we're nothing more than evolutionary instinct. We're mastered by our DNA, scientifically destined for death and decay, humans are not greater than the sum of their parts. Never has man's opinion of himself been smaller than in our age and it scares us deeply. Hence the rise of the zombie's popularity; the zombie is a perfect metaphor for our twenty-first century fears.

The philosopher Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. The truth is that living the 'unexamined life' in a kind of non-living. If we go through life a slave to our desires but never consider ourselves or this life and rise above the din of human routine, then we are a kind of zombie. We can change though. We can master our basest desires rather than being mastered by them. I love zombies because they remind me of what not to be. Man has a spirit, a part of himself that rises above the material plane. I believe firmly in what Shakespeare wrote about mankind:

“What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!”

Everyone has the potential to be more than just a zombie.

The Beatles and Me

2010-01-18T18:00:00.002-07:00

I remember the first die-hard Beatles fan I ever met. Her name was Merisa. She was a really sweet girl who I met at a summer camp at BYU. We met again later when I attended BYU after high school. Merisa was a talented vocalist and she loved music. She would send me emails of song lyrics. I thought they were poems until she sent me a line I recognized from a song. “They paved paradise and put in a parking lot.” A lot of these songs were Beatles songs and she talked a lot about how much she loved them.

It was an odd thing for me; the Beatles were a band long before my time. I was into the current bands of the time. Smashing Pumpkins, The Cranberries, Nirvana, Pearl Jam and U2 were the bands I knew and loved. In fact everyone around me loved those bands too. To me Merisa was this strange anomaly, a woman out of time, like a person at a J.K. Rawlings book signing raving about how great Chaucer is.

I asked Merisa why she was such a fan of the Beatles. She told me that her parents played them all the time and they would sing along as a family. She had a very musical family. My Mother says she loved the Beatles when she was a young girl. Despite that I didn’t grow up listening to the Beatles as a child. It really didn’t bother me; I didn’t know that I was missing out on anything at the time.

There was only one time I can remember feeling like I was missing out on the Beatles experience growing up. It was in high school, me and my friends were driving off campus for lunch. We’d all piled into Natalie’s boat of a beater car, Doug, Natalie, Jodie, myself and others. The song Yellow Submarine came on the radio and instantly everyone in the car cheered. Everyone in the car sang along with the song at the top of their lungs and swayed back and forth in time to the music. They were all so happy, except for me. I didn’t know the words; in fact this was the first time I’d ever heard the song before. As a high school student I was amply skilled in fitting in, I swayed with the crowd in the back seat and mouthed words but I felt left out

With that experience forgotten I didn’t think of the Beatles again until I met Merisa. We became good friends. She had this playful innocence about her that I really liked. She wrote me on my mission but I lost touch with her towards the end of my time away. I didn’t think about Merisa or the Beatles until one profound experience.

When I got back from my mission I was busy trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. As I was exploring the opportunities available on campus I found a ‘Study Abroad’ offer. It was a program that sent college students to foreign countries for a certain period of time to study learning the culture and the language of the place. At least two of my siblings had done study abroad in Europe and enjoyed it so I was interested. BYU had just expanded their program to include a program that took place in Saint Petersburg, Russia. I applied to get into the program, I only had a semester of Russian language at the University but I told them that I had taken three years of Russian in high school. They accepted me despite the fact that I wasn’t qualified for the program, probably because the program was new and they had open seats available.

Academically I was pretty lost on that whole trip, but I loved what I saw of Russia. The language classes were far too advanced for me and I pretty much failed the academic part of the program. What I got out of the trip was mainly the museums and the cultural sights of Russia. The only thing that I remember from the class part of the program was when they had a history teacher from the local university come to teach us.

He gave us a one day crash course on Russia’s history, hitting all the highlights. The fact that he taught us in English isn’t the only reason that I remember his lesson so well. Russia’s history is fascinating and I would encourage anyone to look into it. The thing I remember most fondly about the lesson was his insight into modern Russian events. I’ll never forget when we asked him about the fall of communism. He told us the moment he personally realized that communism wouldn’t work was the day he first heard the Beatles.

Immediately I was in disbelief. How does someone who was indoctrinated since birth listen to a couple guys beat on instruments for a few minutes then suddenly realize that his entire system of government is flawed? Was this guy nuts? He went on to explain that according to Russian communism, Western capitalistic society was the enemy. They believed that capitalism was a dead, the western world still clinging to the past, and that communism was the inevitable destiny of the human race. When he heard the Beatles he couldn’t believe that something so creative and wonderful could have come out of a society that was supposedly so evil.

That was the highest and most intellectualized praise I had ever heard given to the Beatles. That very day I went out to the marketplace on the outskirts of St. Petersburg and bought my first collection of Beatles music. I got to the apartment of the family I was being boarded at and I sat and listened to the music. It was wonderful. This music was so playful, so innocent and so emotional. I was impressed. It reminded of Merisa, a person who was clearly shaped by the music she loved.

Since then I profess my love for the Beatles whenever they come up. Years later I still love to hear their songs and I play Beatles songs for my son and daughter whenever I get the chance. A little while ago I went to my friend Joe’s Beatles Rock Band party and I was reminded of my experience with the Beatles. As I sat with a crowd of friends, we laughed and cheered, singing “Yellow Submarine” together. We were all so happy. There is something about these songs that speak not just to the generation that first listened to them but to everyone. Plus, this time I knew the words.

New Year's Resolution: Conquering the Unread Bookcase

2010-01-11T18:00:00.001-07:00

Since I started writing I've been very concerned with the books I'm reading. To be more specific, I'm concerned with the books I'm not reading. Over the years I've collected quite a few books that I've been planning to read but haven't gotten around to yet. Here's a picture of my bookcase:

I'd say that about 10% of those books are actually read, the rest are just sitting there collecting dust. I've determined that before I spend anymore money amassing a larger library of unread books I'm going to read through all the books in my collection that I haven't read yet. Here are the ground rules for this project:

Have no more than three books going at one time, currently I have more than that going but once I finish some of those I'll maintain that narrow focus of only reading three books (1 Classic Literature, 1 Contemporary Fiction and 1 Non-fiction book).
I will not spend any of my own money on new books. If I am given a book as a gift or given a gift card or store credit that I use for purchasing a book it will immediately be added to the bookshelf and become a part of this project.
If someone lends me a book to read I will read it as a part of this project. Obligation reading is essentially what this project is about (but hey, reading is still reading).

Since I was a child I've always had a special reverence for books. The way they look all lined up on a shelf and the way a new book smells; it all creates this amazing atmosphere. But I'm afraid I neglect the most important aspect of a book, the information inside and how it can teach and transport a person to new people, places and things.

So I've taken the first step, I registered for the website Goodreads.com and added all the unread books in my bookcase to my to-read list. This is my New Years resolution, to conquer the unread bookcase!

Updates will be forthcoming!

Old Books

2010-01-04T18:00:00.002-07:00

There's something about old books. They're like time capsules. A window to another world where people talk and act just a little bit different than we do. Opening an old book is an adventure, every time.

“If you want to learn something new, read a book by someone from 100 years ago.”

An old book is also a mirror on our own world. The things you hear about a classic story before you read the original is a reflection of the things our world values in that world of art. The modern world sees Don Quixote as a lovably wise dreamer striving for the impossible dream. Read it and see that the Don was actually a laughably pathetic man who read too many fantasy books and was justifiably mocked for his foolish delusions (like a man who plays too much Dungeons & Dragons today and decides to wear chain mail and Renaissance Fair garb everywhere). Read Peter Pan and see that Pan was far more sinister and deadly than the 'spirit of youth' portrayed by Walt Disney. Read Frankenstein and see that the monster was more than a groaning infant-minded child; he could reason, speak eloquently, and sought revenge on his creator.

It's not surprising that ideas and characters are recycled so much in our day. The character Sherlock Holmes inspired the television show 'House M.D.' and a new Hollywood movie named after the character. Bram Stoker's original vision of a vampire has been repeatedly re-imagined from Anne Rice's tales to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Stephanie Meyer's Twilight. Greek Mythology is continually recycled through movies (Clash of the Titans), books (Percy Jackson and the Olympians) and even video games (God of War). I would advise that if you don't read the source material for these ideas and characters you are limiting yourself and missing the entirety of the wonderful worlds that spawned these creations. Worlds that even today we can't stop revisiting.

Growing Old

2009-12-28T18:00:00.004-07:00

When I was little I often thought about what kind of old person I'd be. I saw a huge difference in the personalities of older people around me. You had the people who grew old gracefully and ones who went into silver haired life kicking and screaming. You have the kind old man in church who smiled at us kids as we walked past his yard. You had the wise woman who comforted us with wisdom from her age. On the other hand you had the grumpy old man who constantly complained about his pains and the reckless youth around him. Then you had the woman who bemoaned her vanishing youthful looks somehow never imagining that she would reach this stage in life (despite all of nature pointing to it's inevitability).

If it's true what Shakespeare said, that all world's a stage and the men and women the players in it, then there are clearly people who are better at being old than others. I remember thinking this as child; I was determined that when I get old I would be more like the kindly Mr. Miyagi (The Karate Kid) and less like Mr. Wilson (Dennis the Menace). It didn't take long for me to realize that no one consciously decides to become the bitter old man. I was determined to figure out the secret, not to eternal youth but to growing into a nice old person.

So I don't know what that secret is, other than realizing that growing old is a natural part of life and accepting each new stage of life helps keep the “bitter” at bay. Generally speaking just being aware helps a lot. You're not going to live forever. You're not going to be doing the stuff you did twenty years ago and that's okay. Try something new, try being the wise and prudent one instead of the foolish and rash one. It's actually fun, in a “I can't believe they think I know what I'm talking about” way.

A Rock, Some Sand, and Wisdom

2009-12-21T18:00:00.007-07:00

When I was about six years-old I was going to church at the building across the street from my house. I really loved growing up in that house, I lived on Hope Street which I thought was a really cool name for a street to live on. I also thought the house was cool because it was directly across the street from the church we attended. It meant that on weekdays we could use the church parking lot to ride our bicycles around in and not be considered too far from home. In the Summer someone always found a way to get inside the church so we could use the indoor basketball court. But at age six the most important thing about living across the street from church was that we would walk to church every Sunday. It was like clockwork every week.

This one particular time I went to church my Mom had just purchased a suit for me. It was my first suit and I felt very important as a six year-old wearing a suit to church, like a bishop or one of the missionaries. My Mother had told me that I looked very handsome in it and my child heart felt on top of the world. Nothing could ruin my day.

I remember sitting in my Sunday School class. My teacher was Mrs. McGovern, my neighbor who was a nice older woman. She was nice in the distant older person who doesn't really talk to children playing in the yard next to hers during the week way. She wasn't like other older people who get very excited when they see small children and want to hug them and tell them stories. She was nice to me in the class, I imagined it was because I was her favorite since I was her neighbor. Before class started she complimented me on my new suit, I felt inches taller, and she asked if I would help her in an object lesson.

An object lesson was something I was very familiar with as a six year-old, it meant that something special was going to happen in class. I agreed to help her. As class started Mrs. McGovern brought out two containers, they both looked like plant pots with little dishes attached to the bottom. In one pot there was a flat rock, in the other pot there was some sand packed into a square block. She placed them both on the table so we could all see them. Then she took out some building blocks and built two simple houses, one on top of the rock and and one on top of the pile of sand.

She asked me and another boy in the group to come to the front of the class. She said that the house on the sand was my house and the house on the rock was the other boy's house. She asked the class who was the wise man and who was the foolish man for building their house on a rock or on the sand. At my age I honestly didn't know, but I really hoped I was the wise man, I mean I had the suit and everything for it. Mrs. McGovern gave us each a little watering can and asked the me and the other boy to go out of the classroom and fill them from the drinking fountain at the end of the hall.

The walk back to the classroom with my full watering can was nerve racking. I did my best not to spill a single drop even though I was livid with anticipation. When we got back to the classroom our teacher asked us to wait outside until she ask us to. The waiting didn't help me, I could hear the teacher speaking and then the children sang a little song. I heard the music but I couldn't make out the words. Finally after what seemed like an eternity my neighbor asked us to come inside the classroom with our little watering cans. Ms. McGovern asked the other boy to come up first while I stood and watched. The children began to sing a song:

The wise man built his house upon the rock
The wise man built his house upon the rock

The wise man built his house upon the rock

And the rain came tumbling down

Our teacher motioned for the other boy to pour his watering can over the little block structure on the rock. He poured as the children sang further:

Oh, the rain came down
And the floods came up

The rain came down

And the floods came up

The rain came down

And the floods came up

And the wise man's house stood firm.

The house was wet but unphased. My grey-haired neighbor motioned for me to come to the front of the class. I walked up, my small hands tightly gripping the cold water vessel. The children's song continued:

The foolish man built his house upon the sand

And the rain came tumbling down

I poured the water over the house and its foundation of compacted sand.

Oh, the rain came down
And the floods came up

The rain came down

And the floods came up

The rain came down

And the floods came up

And the foolish man's house went "splat!"

The sand seemed to melt away under the stream of water and the feeble house of blocks collapsed. Now normally I would have cheered at the sight of wanton destruction like any normal six year-old boy, but the implications of this demonstration struck me hard. I wasn't even listening as the last verse was sung:

So, build your house on the Lord Jesus Christ
Build your house on the Lord Jesus Christ

Build your house on the Lord Jesus Christ

And the blessings will come down

Oh, the blessings come down

As your prayers go up

The blessings come down

As your prayers go up

The blessings come down

As your prayer go up

So build your house on the Lord Jesus Christ.

I was the foolish man. My little mind reeled at the thought of it. Not only did I have poor judgement in real estate and hired a shabby contractor for my house, but I had also apparently not built my life on a foundation of Christ. How was that possible? Especially when I was so smartly dressed.

Needless to say I've thought about that object lesson throughout my life. It didn't take long for me to understand that a foolish man would never realize that he was in fact foolish. Just like the Pharisees never realized they were crucifying the Messiah. Just like the sinner thinks he can hide his sins from God and the world. Just like you and me.

I like to think that I'm wise but often I find myself driving pylons into sandy beaches in my life and thinking, "this will hold." Thankfully I like to think of Mrs McGovern's lesson whenever I think a little too highly of myself, or dress a little too sharply, and I wonder if I'm being the wise man or the foolish man. Taking just that moment to think has made a huge difference in my life, and often it's helped me from building on a sandy foundation.

Label Makers

2009-12-14T00:31:00.000-07:00

I recently read a book called My Life as a Guinea Pig by A.J. Jacobs. One of the observations he made in his marriage was the negative effect of labels. He mentioned that it seems like you do something clumsy a couple times and suddenly you're known as the 'clumsy one'. Once you have that label you're always the 'clumsy one', and then you start to live up to that label. I mean why be more careful if people don't expect you to be careful? That same principle could be applied to other things. In marriages you often see the 'responsible one', the 'one that's good with money', the 'one who's always late', the 'one that disciplines the kids'.

The danger of labels is that we can start to believe the labels others have put on us or the labels we put on others. It seems so obvious to me when I hear people talk about their parents in a negative light. Usually it's because their parents have labeled them in a way that they don't apprecate. “You're so forgetful”, “you never finish what you start”, “you're not good with confrontation”, all of which could be totally true but how does that make the labeled person feel about themselves?

I know that it's important to be aware of and recognize our faults; that way we can begin the process of changing and improving ourselves. But when it comes to long term things, things that we've been aware of for years, things we've struggled a lifetime to overcome, a label ceases to be a reminder of improvement and simply becomes our identity. If we label our family members and friends, let them be good labels because a negative label only shows our lack of confidence in their ability to change. And if they don't have our confidence then can we even consider ourselves a true friend or family member?

On Humor

2009-12-07T18:00:00.008-07:00

Cultivating a sense of humor never really seemed like a priority for me growing up, either you were one of the funny ones or you weren't. You weren't funny you stood in the back corner and laughed at the comedy stylings of Bill Cosby, Yakov Smirnoff and the class clown. And yet now that I have children I'm far more concerned about how vital a sense of humor is for people. I imagine that humor is a kind of litmus test of well adjustment.

You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it. -Bill Cosby

I'm told there's a correlation between a sense of humor and mental health. I believe it; the times I've felt depressed I haven't had a funny bone in my body, and yet when I'm laughing my heart is light and happy. I don't need a scientific study to tell me that laughter and making other people laugh is a recipe for a healthy cocktail of chemicals in the brain.

Dental healthcare underwent a huge change. Less than sixty years ago, all a dentist used to do was drill cavities, pour fillings and make false teeth. Now dentistry is all about preventative medicine. Dentists today train patients on how to take care of their teeth, do cleanings and rarely drill a cavity. The evolution of dentistry from disease treatment to preventative medicine is a remarkable achievement for mankind.

Science and medicine are making a lot of progress in other areas of health. Especially now that healthcare has become such a social hot topic, preventative medicine is becoming an increasingly important option for healthcare. More doctors are talking about wholistic approaches to healthcare, regularly giving patients advice on exercise and diet. It's only a matter of time before a wave of preventative medicine sweeps mental healthcare. When that happens what kind of advice will doctors give us about preventing depression. I don't know, but I can imagine that it'll include a shot of laughter and a prescription to make someone else laugh.

As I get older I struggle to keep my wit sharp. Despite that, I find myself pointing out funny things around me more than I used to when I was younger. I try to make those around me laugh, not to get attention or make light of a situation but because I feel it's important to keep a healthy atmosphere around me. There's something healthy about a good sense of humor and the spirit it brings to those around me. I don't know where a sense of humor falls on Maslow's heirarchy of needs but I think it should be closer to the foundation than to the top.

So here's to a good joke, and here's to making people happy through laughter.

Pumpkin Shells

2009-11-30T22:27:00.001-07:00

The nursery rhyme goes:

Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater

Had a wife and couldn't keep her

Put her in a pumpkin shell

And there he kept her very well.

This rhyme has always confused me, how does putting someone in a pumpkin shell help you overcome a problem. It sounds like avoidance more than anything, and of course a lifetime of sage advice and modern therapy has taught me that avoidance is the enemy. The Pumpkin Eater is just putting off his problems for another day.

On top of my confusion with this rhyme, as a child whenever I read anything with a character with my first name I was instantly that character; fearfully I was the rabbit escaping from Mr. McGregor; depressed I was a fourth grade nothing; ashamedly I denied Christ before the cock crowed thrice; I was a piper who picked pickled peppers; and for some reason I was a strange pumpkin eater who kept a wife in a pumpkin shell. I was a little crazy as a kid.

Since my childhood I've learned not to transfer myself onto others so much, but as a consequence I still find it easy to relate to different people and characters. Time has taught me a lot of things since I was a kid, one of the most important things is perspective. Sometimes there are things that we see as important which are in reality not quite as important as we think they are. During these crisis we scream and shout but if we only had a little distance, a little time and perspective, we might be able to deal with them better.

The pumpkin shell in the rhyme is an interesting concept when you think about it, a Deus Ex Machina. It's the thing that magically solves your problems or alleviates your worries. Simply put, Peter has a problem and he finds a way to deal with that problem, it works out (very well). We all have troubles and we all have our ways of dealing with those troubles. Some of those ways don't work very well and just make us more miserable. Other things we do are more constructive and help us deal with those problems. Some things just give us the right amount of distance and perspective to help us accept the things we cannot change and the courage to change the things we can. I like to think of those last things as "pumpkin shells".

I've learned that it's important to recognize the things in life that actually help me deal with my problems. I'm still learning to tell the difference between those two things in my life. I've found that writing is a great way for me to deal with some of life's more complicated issues; it gives me a perspective; it gives me hope; it's a creative outlet; it's my pumpkin shell. This is one of the reasons I'm starting this blog.