what's a con-tri-bu-tor?
(conversations with kathy)
((a preview))


have you looked on the right side of this page in the last few days? have you noticed anything different? do you now?

remember early last year when i tried not-so-hard to get "hannah and caroline and us" off the ground. i'll give you some insight into the process. in january of 2009, i sent an email out to several individuals, friends and family, that i thought were close enough to me, the girls and this blog to be worthy and interesting new additions to these parts. i didn't necessarily want HACAM to become too diverse too often. i am much too selfish for that. but i was interested in finding folks that cared about the girls that had shown some sporadic interest in writing themselves to help freshen up the place, if you will. well, some responded to the emails. some didn't. some excused themselves from the idea. some didn't want to go first. i didn't do a great job of following up and "hannah and caroline and us" ended up as a two part series. you can see the two parts here and here. thanks to kiker and rebecca for being willing to come outside and play. if either of you ever feel an itch that needs to be scratched, you are always welcome on this blog.

many things on the blog fell by the wayside last year for many reasons, but i've never stopped wishing for more than my opinions to be the only ones shared on HACAM as this world continued to evolve. thankfully, i've found my next willing participant, kathy h.

who is kathy h., you might ask? you might not really care. but the girls will. the girls do. and that's all that matters.

physically, kathy h. is the personification of bearvsshark's final album (r.i.p, best band ever), terrorhawk. mentally, she's a lot like that feeling i had when i yelled "it's a future-back!!!" at the television screen towards the end of the third season finale of LOST. figuratively, she's the first car you drove when you were sixteen. ultimately, she'll define herself for you (here) over the course of however long "conversations with kathy" maintains both of our interest.

so, what will you guys be talking about?

i am glad you asked. we are going to have our own little book club mixed with the 'formidable opponent' segments from the colbert report.  it'll probably end up as part debate, part celebrating how smart and/or enlightened we both think we are, part me thinking she has no idea what she's talking about and vice versa.

our subject? our initial inspiration? conversations with god, book 1 by neale donald walsch.

what's that about?

well, the conceit is this: (from wikipedia)

"...at a low period in his life, Walsch wrote an angry letter to God asking questions about why his life wasn't working. After writing down all of his questions, he heard a voice over his right shoulder say: "Do you really want an answer to all these questions or are you just venting?" Though when he turned around he saw no one there, Walsch felt answers to his questions filling his mind and decided to write them down. The ensuing dialogue became the Conversations with God books."

sound interesting? well, yeah. the book is interesting. and if you can suspend your disbelief that this kind of dialogue could happen between one of us and the G-O-D, then it's really interesting.  

we won't be commenting directly (sometimes maybe not at all) on the book itself as much as we'll talk about ideas that the book spawned in our respective heads. i asked kathy to pick the first idea.

and?

she chose free will. is it really free will if we have to behave a certain way to find a certain reward?

this is going to be fun. hopefully, for all of us.

kathy...the floor is yours!