Category: Youth

With the exception of teenagers who can’t wait to become full-fledged adults (why I’m still not sure) many of us aren’t really that tickled about growing older. I myself felt a little blindsided this year when after blowing out my birthday candles I realized I was 36 years old. That means I’m in my mid to late 30’s! How the hell did that happen and where in God’s name did all these gray hairs come from? I suppose I should be thankful there’s still anything up there at all, right? But even though I’m growing older, I’ve made a conscious decision not to fight it and become one of those people who spends much of their time and money trying to find a fountain of youth that simply doesn’t exist.…

I used to think that once you graduated from high school, you were forever set free from the catty, judgmental world of pubescence. But as a friend of mine recently reminded me, there’s no escaping it. Just look around your neighborhoods or the places you work and you’ll find the same populous hierarchy, the same backstabbing chatter and gossip and even bullying from teenage jocks whose mentality hasn’t changed even though they’re twenty-years older. I hated high school for this very reason, and now having been around the business block long enough, I find myself sometimes feeling like a teenager all over again. I guess adulthood is not exempt from the same BS that went on in crowded hallways and classrooms so many years ago. It’s easy to forget that…

If the world of social sites such as YouTube has taught us anything, it’s just how dumb we really. Take Alexandra Wallace, a UCLA student who recently posted a three-minute bitch session on YouTube about all the Asian students on campus. She whined about how they use their cell phones in the library and drag their entire family on campus for regular housecleaning – even pathetically mocking their accent to further add insult to injury. But nothing amused me more than when she said they should “learn American manners” and make their calls elsewhere. Really? Does she live in this country or just spend most of her life hidden on the floor of her closet? Americans learn manners? Please. We’ve become some of the rudest, most uncaring people around, and…

Famed author and renowned lecturer Leo Buscaglia championed the cause of how we seek happiness and create loving relationships over the course of our lifetime.  He once told the story of how he was asked to judge a competition in search of the most caring child alive today. To the surprise of many, the young boy who won did so based more on his actions than on his words. The young boy had an elderly neighbor whose wife had recently passed away.  Upon seeing the old man crying, the little boy made his way into the neighbor’s yard, climbed onto his lap and just sat there silently with him. When he returned home his mother asked what he had said to the old man while he was there on his…