The platonic "love story" of a young woman who I met, had a pretend romantic relationship with (the campers expected no less!), lost, refound, and lost again. It's interesting how paths cross and criss-cross in a lifetime, and how we often hope the cross again.

BIG DATA is watching us, but we don't know why. But we have our suspicions, and it's not to make better products and services for us. Can anyone truly learn anything from all the quantitative data that is being collected? Maybe we need to talk about Quality in Life, stop grazing art, and stop photographing the roses soo we can smell them.

This episode is perhaps more of an editorial that a memory about higher education. I am unsure why education is under attack, unless there is some nefarious plan afoot. For me, my education improved my life immensely, and allowed me to be successful in life beyond my original dreams.

Life allows for revelations to occur from time to time. A fever once helped me have a revelation about GIlligan's Island. I had a life-changing revelation when I discovered GarageBand; my longtime search a composer to create music for my songs suddenly became me, thanks to loops! I include three of my revelation-related spoken word pieces, "I, Prometheus," "So Relaxed," and "Echo Ever After."

My wife and I have had some very non-traditional moments in our life together, even when pursuing very traditional paths. A case in point was our wedding. For years, I have threatened to write a play about that weekend; here are some glimpses into some of the odder moments of our wedding.

I really do enjoy technology. Without it, I wouldn't be writing this paragraph on my laptop, about to upload a podcast episode to the web. And a thousand other things we all do on a daily basis. But always nagging me is the thought, what if the cloud, or worse, the grid, goes down? How will we all cope?

Commercials and advertisements have been with us for a long time, and follow us wherever we go. Sometimes they are targeted at us as individuals--and what could be more annoying? We used to accept them as a necessary evil, but is that attitude necessary anymore?

My love of progressive rock is well known; I currently listen to practically nothing else in my day-to-day. And a lot of what I occasionally hear (by accident, or passing by with loud speakers in a car on the road) I don''t care for. But I think whatever you like is fine, because that's your thing. And I hate it when someone tries to pass judgement on music they just don't like. Dude, get over yourself. Just be aware of the perils of old vinyl!

A few years back, I wrote a memoir called Immaculate Misconceptions: Tales from Catholic School. This episode contains some material from that volume, as well as a few additional stories.

We often learn how to treat others through our personal experiences; we don't want to put someone through what we had been through. This is evident in the way I approach actors when I direct. And sometimes those actors, they just confound me!