I’m on a mailing list for lucid dreamers. Every time someone new learns how to lucid dream, I remember the excitement I felt the first time I learned to lucid dream.

It is still one of the coolest things I’ve ever learned how to do.

I got home from helping with the Tour De Cure event here in North Carolina. When I got home, I stood and stared at the house, taking in all the details, as if not trusting what I saw.

I could’ve sworn that everything looked different. Everything was different. It had to be. And yet, I couldn’t quite identify any change in particular.

Later yesterday evening, I figured out that it wasn’t my home that had changed – it was me! I had departed Saturday morning to do something new – volunteer for a public service event. Because I had been willing to venture outside of my comfortable existence, the eyes I brought home saw everything in a different light.

Travel can do that for you, but you don’t need to travel. Just trust yourself enough to try something new and you will never be the same.

I just received an email from a developer in Denmark with whom I’m developing an application. It took minutes to type a reply to him, and seconds for it to travel halfway around the world.

I also converse regularly with a friend in Australia. In real-time. It seems like he is still living across town, yet he’s on the other side of the planet.

The Internet is still astonishing. At no time in history has the world been so interconnected, our planet so small. Everyday people have the miraculous power of instant communications from anywhere on the globe, to anywhere on the globe.

This is the world my daughter’s being born into. Her world will be one where national boundaries will be for convenience only, where any space can be traversed instantaneously. It will be exciting to see what kind of world gets built on this revolutionary foundation.

I finally got around to watching the special on the USS Liberty that ran on The History Channel last month.

I’d heard the story about the USS Liberty before. It was an American ship that got attacked by Israel during the Six-Day War. I had assumed that Israel would have come to its senses by now and admitted they bombed us.

I assumed wrong. The sight of Israel’s embassy spokesman insisting to this day that Israel had mistaken the Liberty for a combatant ship sent me into a seething rage.

Israel knew damn well what it was doing. It was attacking an unarmed ship in international waters. For all the blather about Israel and America being allies, Israel plays the U.S. like a fiddle. Israel gets what it wants from us and then thumbs its nose at us.

Israel will get no sympathy from me until sees fit to right this treacherous wrong.

So, the gloves are off in the Mideast. I’m only hoping that both sides wake up and figure out that violence isn’t the most effective way to influence people. Mayhem has gone on there so long that people are jaded by it.

Arafat isn’t in control of the Palestinians. Sharon isn’t in control of the Israelis. Well, Sharon could order the troops to stand down, but he probably feels pressured not to back down.

Politicians never want to be seen being bested. It’s important that a trusted outside party step in and mediate. Each side’s trust of the other has evaporated, as has each side’s trust in themselves to find a solution.

I was feeling in a contemplative mood today. Maybe it was the drenching the area got last night. Maybe it was the fun weekend spent with Kelly’s family. Maybe it was the gorgeous morning that greeted me. For whatever reason, it was a morning where I kept dreaming while I went about working.

I was starting to get into a programming task when a look out the window gave me a zen moment. I had a thought – a small knowing – that life is infinitely more connected than we humans allow ourselves to realize. The thought was one of some pity – that we deny ourselves out of a far more fufilling life. Another way of explaining it was that we have no appreciation of the worlds which are set in motion from our tiniest thought, act, or decision.

It was a thought I savored all day.

I suppose I should write this down in case there’s any question later on. Saturday morning on the 16th, the weekend before we got our Bambina pictures, I woke from my dozing and announced to Kelly we were having a “GURL!” (as my neice Victoria used to say). She asked me how I knew, and I told her about my dream.

It was one of those dreams that stands out – a you-better-remember-this-you-dork dream. It was the last thing in my head before I awoke. In my dream, I was staring proudly at a wedding invitation to be delivered. It was an invitation to the wedding of an old high-school acquaintance named Gina. I didn’t decode the meaning at that point, but I concluded that the wedding invite meant we were having a girl.

After the pictures came back, I figured out the significance of the name: The name was Gina, as in “va-gina.”

I’m calling it an early night tonight, because I’ve been bushed lately. This week has been particularly hard because of all the commitments I’ve made with my time. Seems like for the past couple of days I’ve been leaving home at 8 in the morning and getting back 13 hours or later. I also worked all day Sunday. This kind of schedule can become a real grind after a while.

Fortunately, I am in control of these things. I could drop my participation in the city basketball league, freeing up two nights a week, for instance. The games usually start at 9PM, making me get home at 10 or later – completely wired and unable to sleep.

I also volunteer for the N.C. Museum Of Art as well as Garner Crimestoppers. Neither one puts a big dent in my time, so they’re pretty safe.

Yet, part of the joy (or curse) of running your own business is that you can work practically any time you want to. And when there is business to be done, it’s hard to turn it down. My clients depend on me to help them out. It’s a duty I don’t take lightly. Even though I may have more fun things lined up to do, I will drop everything to keep them happy.

The days of work being the top priority in my life may be nearing a close as I approach the prospect of fatherhood. Zoinks!

(And I can hear you now, Mom and Dad: “If you think you’re tired now….”)

This weekend I was driving behind a car full of young black men. Even though they were driving safely, I wondered about where they were going. Then I felt guilty about it.

Further down the road, I realized that I probably would’ve wondered about a car full of young white men, only without the guilt.

It was then that I realized that it doesn’t matter what race strangers are – I simply don’t like strangers.

I remember a sketch Eddie Murphy once did on Saturday Night Live. His character wondered what it would be like to be white, so he had himself made up to look white. His experience was a parody, of course, with shopkeepers urging him to “just take” store merchandise and other such incidents. It was good for some laughs, but the underlying question is tantalizing: what would it be like to be another race?

That’s a question that can only be answered in another lifetime.