Navigating This Site

I rolled out the site today (April 30, 2014) to the general public.  I think most blog sites are single page entries that you scroll.  So I am not sure that people will find all of the content that I have nested inside of here.  I have used a new feature called Pages - they are actually virtual pages that redirect a post based on it's label.  It took me quite some time to figure this out!  (See Frustrated!) But what this allows me to do is group my blogs under various topic areas.  In this way people can hit the content they are interested in, and ignore the rest.

To navigate pages - look at the blue bar underneath the blogs description.  It has four buttons you can click on - Blog Posts (general content), Poetry, Short Story, and Photography.  I will likely add more as even now I am toying with a couple of other things... If you want to see them all in order - you can also get to that a couple of different ways! 

I hope I did not make it too complicated!  I added some instructions to the right of the post area as well.  Hopefully this gets everyone around the site just fine!

"The Song in My Heart" - April 1984, Cedarville, Ohio

I was a freshman in college during this Spring of my life.  I had just met the person who would be my first love in life.  I was a jumbled up mess.  Having grown up in the Baptist Faith, I had deep roots in religion. The conflicts that started that Spring grew to be ferocious 8 years later when I would finally acknowledge and admit to them.  In the meanwhile, I faced an internal struggle with my emotions - and trying to reach out to the only thing I knew for comfort.  This actually has a tune - it is a real song that I still sing to myself sometimes - but only verse 1 and the chorus.  Verses 2 and 3 do not quite fit the melody I created!  At some point maybe I will put the melody to paper (and add a section on the blog called Songs!)

The Song in My Heart by Angela Wilcox, 1984

Sometimes when things around me,
Get too difficult to bear,
I find myself looking inward,
And forget that you are there.

Chorus
Lord, help me to look to you,
and depend upon you in my need.
For you'll always be there,
Willing to hear every prayer...
     ...Lord I want to depend on you.

I strive to do well on my own,
Til my body is tired and weak.
And then I realize no success will I gain
Until you I finally seek.

People around try to comfort and cheer,
For my face often shows how I'm feeling.
But I know that from you I can get all I need,
For my Peace and my Joy you will be.

"My Journey" - July 1992, Argyle, Texas

This was a very special summer for me... It marked the beginning of my life as me.  Eventually, I will post older poetry as well, but at this point there is a radical change in theme and content.  It was the summer I finally decided, while in a safe place, to tell my family I was a lesbian.  I really thought that summer, I would die.  I did not.  They did not. My journey began, in earnest.

My Journey by Angela Wilcox, July 1992

The pain in my eyes,
The tears on my cheek,
The sorrow deep down in my heart.

     These are a part of my journey,
     Begun as a search for me.
     The road ahead is dark, full of pitfalls,
     Yet ahead, there's a light I can see.

For the pain, a gentle touch for comfort;
For the tears, a shoulder and a hug;
For my heart, a friend I can share with.

     My journey turns into adventure,
     Where I know I will finally find me.
     The road now ahead bright, not so scary,
     And I realize, I'll finally be free.

Tinker - My Angel Dog

Over time, I have taken many many photo's of Tinker.  This may well be one of my favorites! Something to get this section started. More to come.

Poetry - A Special Way of Thinking

As long as I can remember, I have written poetry to express myself, when nothing else seemed to quite relay what I was thinking or feeling.  A lot of the pieces I have written are very dark, as I revert to writing when I am sad and confused and trying to find my way.  Some of them are written in moments of great discovery - when I realize something momentous about life, or the people in my life.  I have written poetry FOR people as gifts (and some of that has been lost forever as girlfriends have burned them upon my departure) and some of that has been pretty decent.  I should have written them all down and kept them in my possession so they were not lost forever... but anyway, I digress... I believe writing to be cathartic for a lot of people - and I think there are likely more closet poets than myself!

Since I believe a lot of people actually write poetry, I wonder why so few people purchase poetry?  It is nearly impossible to get a book of poetry published... because there is such a small audience to purchase it.   Anyway - in this section I will slowly log out a great number of the pieces I have written.  This is a shorty (if you know me, this is probably shocking as I am generally quite wordy!)  I wrote it in 1992, and I wrote it for a person I met that special summer.
  

CONTENTMENT   

The warm summers night, 

     The bright moonlight, 

          The beauty of the stars.

The whispering wind, 

     The voice of my friend, 

          The rhythm of our hearts.

I realize true contentment.   

-- A.W. @1992

Technology In Motion

Yesterday (April 25, 2014) I went with a group of friends to the "Perot Museum of Nature and Science" (http://www.perotmuseum.org/) for a day of "active" education.  We were there on a school day so that allowed us to have 1300 (+/- a few thousand) elementary school children as our co-guests at the museum. This led to a great deal of people watching, as well as looking at and playing with the exhibits ourselves. One of the great things about this museum is that it is not just a museum - i.e. while it houses artifacts in the exhibits, it also allows you to play and interact with the exhibits and concepts of the exhibits.

One of the exhibits had a mechanical arm.  You sat down at the table and touched the governing electrodes to your own arm and tried to control the mechanical hand through flexing your own muscles.  I found this exceptionally difficult, and felt somewhat handicapped that it did not read my flexing motions the way I wanted it to.  I had to watch what the hand did and adapt my flexing to get the correct result of an opening and closing of the hand.

In another section there was a room where you could make music.  Set of drums, piano, synthesizer to record...  A grandpa came in with his wife and grand-daughter.  He immediately started playing the piano (boy could he play) and the wife was trying to show the grand-daughter how to keep tempo with him on the drums.  Their love and comfort-ability with music, and desire to have her feel the same - and just play with it... well it was really awesome to see...  The look of joy on her face once she caught on to the drums, just for a few beats, was radiant.

At one point, when we were in the Dinosaur exhibit, our eyes fell on a young girl that was perhaps 7 or 8 years old.  She was trying to pick out a stuffed Dinosaur, as any small child would want to do.  But this young girl made us all, frankly, stare.  She had two artificial legs, the new high tech ones that bend at the ankles and knees, similar to the one shown on the left here. My brain flashed back to the mechanical arm exhibit I had just played with.  How hard that must be to get TWO different limbs to work so flawlessly I thought to myself.  I think when she stood on her tip toes to look at something, several of our hearts nearly melted to the ground. We could not take our eyes off of her.

We had been surrounded with amazing technology all day... so why did this singular display touch us all so? For me, it was because you realize that all of this science has some very practical results.  You realize that it is not all about just sitting in labs and tinkering with mechanics, etc... but that many times the exploration results in the changing of lives.  Lives that would be quite different had the use of a particular set of technologies not been set in motion.

Of the hundreds of things we looked at and experienced, it is these two moments (well three as we must include playing the life game with my friends - we were such juveniles for a moment in time) that will remain in my memory and stand out when I think of this museum; the strength of one small girl whose life was enhanced by technology, and the smile of another whose life was touched by the joy of music.

Frustrated!

Already Frustrated!  I am technically savvy so you think I could catch on to this blog sites authoring tools fairly quickly.  I cannot.  So I am just going to say right now, if you find this blog spot quickly, forgive me as I dork around with it and move things around.  I am trying to figure out how to use pages to organize types of posts as I think this will be more useful to readers who want to focus on one type of content vs. another.