The Secret

There is a book called "The Secret" and I don't even remember what the secret was in the book.

I guess it didn't make much of an impression.

I used to feel like aliens had left me here and hoped they would come back. I felt there was a secret that everyone else knew that I didn't know. Like maybe at about the time you got the birds and the bees talk your parents gave you this secret only my parents who didn't even realise they had any kind of responsibility for us had neglected this important task.

I think life is exactly like baseball.

Amy decided she wanted to cook and what she decided to make first was cupcakes. She went about it so slowly, carefully reading the cookbook and chosing a recipie, so carefully measuring ingredients and asking me what "Beat" exactly meant. After an hour she finally set the timer and put her cupcakes in the oven. I acted like nothing important was happening, but inside I knew that her whole idea of cooking was about to start. If the cupcakes didn't turn out well, she would start to think herself a bad cook, that cooking was difficult, or that cooking was something that she herself could not do. If the second time trying to cook it didn't work out and then again the third time, it is 3 strikes and you are out.

The cupcakes turned out beautifully and Amy always says she is a great cook. The only thing she cooks is chinese noodles but never mind that. Success leads to success and to confidence.

I think in life I've been struck out. I have tried different things and they haven't worked out. I keep trying but it is at different things, not those things I failed at. Each failure is one more knot in my coffin and each failure shines on my opinion of myself. I don't even think it is true that I am failure but it is inside you and cannot be removed. Knowledge does not mean that you are free, oh no, we are never free. We took this path instead of the other path and there found ogres and ghouls and are bound now to be forever afraid. We know these, our own monsters.

Then some of us have children, and we find ourselves living vicariously through them. My success now is their success and I feel this success as if it were my own. I never knew that life would be like that. My parents didn't feel what I feel, this overwhelming pride in your offspring. This is part of being a grown-up, this is the way things were meant to be. There is a way around things that you thought insurmountable. Even the fact that people do not listen to me I've gotten around that by writing. Here another fact of astrology comes out, that the written word is different from the spoken word. Astrology seperates these two things. The ninth house rules the public expression of ideas and there sits my planet of power, Pluto, and there sits my planet of genius, Uranus. I publish what I write and marvel, that I who is so inconsequential in person can be so compelling when I write. So even if I cannot talk and be heard I can write.

Life may be baseball, but rules were made to be broken.