{"id":32,"date":"2013-01-10T12:01:44","date_gmt":"2013-01-10T18:01:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hanilives.com\/?page_id=32"},"modified":"2013-02-10T15:30:42","modified_gmt":"2013-02-10T21:30:42","slug":"ch1-a-greetings-from-another-century","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/hanilives.com\/?page_id=32","title":{"rendered":"ch. 1a    Greetings from Another Century"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"Chapter 1:  Beginnings\" href=\"https:\/\/hanilives.com\/?page_id=43\">&lt; previous\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 <a title=\"ch. 1b    High Hopes and Stumbles\" href=\"https:\/\/hanilives.com\/?page_id=54\">next &gt;<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em>Prefer to listen?\u00a0 Click here:<\/em><\/p>\n<div id=\"mp3jWrap_0\" class=\"mjp-s-wrapper s-graphic unsel-mjp  verdana-mjp\" style=\"font-size:14px;\"><span id=\"playpause_wrap_mp3j_0\" class=\"wrap_inline_mp3j\" style=\"font-weight:700;\"><span class=\"gfxbutton_mp3j play-mjp\" id=\"playpause_mp3j_0\" style=\"font-size:14px;\">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/span>&nbsp;<span class=\"group_wrap\"><span class=\"bars_mp3j\"><span class=\"loadB_mp3j\" id=\"load_mp3j_0\"><\/span><span class=\"posbarB_mp3j\" id=\"posbar_mp3j_0\"><\/span><\/span><span class=\"T_mp3j\" id=\"T_mp3j_0\" style=\"font-size:14px;\">1. Chapter-1-a<\/span><span class=\"indi_mp3j\" style=\"font-size:9.8px;\" id=\"statusMI_0\"><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div><span class=\"s-nosolution\" id=\"mp3j_nosolution_0\" style=\"display:none;\"><\/span><script>\nMP3jPLAYLISTS.inline_0 = [\n\t{ name: \"1. Chapter-1-a\", formats: [\"mp3\"], mp3: \"aHR0cHM6Ly9oYW5pbGl2ZXMuY29tL3dwLWNvbnRlbnQvdXBsb2Fkcy9IUy1jaC0xLWEtbmV3Lm1wMw==\", counterpart:\"\", artist: \"\", image: \"\", imgurl: \"\" }\n];\n<\/script>\n\n<script>MP3jPLAYERS[0] = { list: MP3jPLAYLISTS.inline_0, tr:0, type:'single', lstate:'', loop:false, play_txt:'&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;', pause_txt:'&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;', pp_title:'', autoplay:false, download:false, vol:100, height:'' };<\/script>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i><a href=\"https:\/\/hanilives.com\/?attachment_id=7\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-7\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-7\" alt=\"hanis-backpack\" src=\"https:\/\/hanilives.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/hanis-backpack-150x150.jpg\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/><\/a>The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,<br \/>\nMoves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit<br \/>\nShall lure it back to cancel half a Line,<br \/>\nNor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.<\/i><\/p>\n<p><i>Edward Fitzgerald translation, <em>The Rub\u00e1iy\u00e1t of Omar Khayyam<\/em><\/i><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Here\u2019s the first thing.\u00a0 You don\u2019t have to read this story in chronological order.<\/p>\n<p>It will make more sense to read it that way \u2013 if it makes any sense at all \u2013 but maybe you\u2019re the kind who likes to leap ahead.<\/p>\n<p>If there\u2019s one thing I know all about, it\u2019s taking leaps.<\/p>\n<p>Still, I\u2019m going to take it from the top, give you a quick sashay through my youth and the not-so-brilliant years of my early adulthood.\u00a0 Let\u2019s face it, no one who\u2019s really happy and successful goes leaping away from the world they\u2019re happy and successful in, do they?<\/p>\n<p>And if you pay close attention, you\u2019ll start to piece together the karmic patterns of my life, that scatterplot of what may at first look like just isolated and random events.\u00a0 When you take a step back and look at the Big Picture, a lot becomes clear.\u00a0 Wordsworth said the child is father of the man.\u00a0 Or mother of the woman, I say; let\u2019s be equal here.\u00a0 Maybe what comes later won\u2019t be quite so hard to swallow once you know what came first.<\/p>\n<p>The reality is that I did have a life on Earth, a semi-normal life, for nearly 35 years.\u00a0 I stumbled around, made decisions both good and bad, knew love and maybe more than my share of loss.\u00a0 It\u2019s also true that the events immediately leading up to my abrupt departure got a little crazy.\u00a0 Even at the time, I thought it would have made a great Grisham plot.\u00a0 Except for the leaving Earth part, of course, that was more Speilberg than Grisham, I suppose.\u00a0 You\u2019ll see.\u00a0 In the meantime, let me formally introduce myself.<\/p>\n<p>My name, Hanalie, was given to me by my mother, who was, let\u2019s just say, \u00a0kind of a space case.\u00a0 Really, she meant well, and did all right by me on the whole, I suppose, but who names her only child after a made-up country in an old Peter, Paul, and Mary song, just to be cute?<\/p>\n<p>You know that song, right?\u00a0 Everyone did, when I was growing up; they were still singing it when I left the planet.\u00a0 I know, because, like dragons, it apparently lives forever, along with all the childhood teasing I had to endure.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Peter, Paul &amp; Mary - Puff The Magic Dragon\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/b57aYTJEZbI?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Did my early life prepare me for what came later?\u00a0 It did make me pretty independent, out of necessity more than anything else.\u00a0 My mom was the center of her own universe, and for the most part, the center of my dad\u2019s too, which left me more or less on my own.\u00a0 Dad worked for a series of big corporations.\u00a0 We moved around a lot: Houston, Denver, Atlanta.<\/p>\n<p>From early on, I was a dreamer, I guess, head in the clouds, heart on my sleeve, over-full of compassion so that I was more interested in saving the whales, and finding the meaning of life, than I was in starting over again in a new city, making new friends.\u00a0 I mean, I did all right.\u00a0 School was always easy for me, and I loved writing and music, so I had some creative and social tools for coping.\u00a0 But I suppose I grew up just assuming that change was always going to be a constant, and that landing on my feet was just what a gal does.<\/p>\n<p>Dad force-fed me the music of his generation, all that baby-boomer stuff, Beatles, Stones, Aretha.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t realize how much it stuck until I was long gone from the planet, and he was too long gone for me to thank.\u00a0 Mom taught me to play the guitar, taught me all the old folk songs.\u00a0 Then, when I got old enough to do a little performing, I started getting the distinct feeling there was only room for one center of attention in our household.<\/p>\n<p>So I deliberately chose a college that took me away from Atlanta, where we\u2019d settled. I chose mountains, and the University of Colorado, in Boulder, as much for the free-form culture as the education.\u00a0 What did I know?\u00a0 I was seventeen.\u00a0 For so many kids, college is a big step.\u00a0 For me, making big leaps was already just a way of life.<\/p>\n<p>There I was, in the boom time of the nineties, when almost everyone was<\/p>\n<p>in school to get their MBA so they could go off and make a zillion bucks.\u00a0 I was never going that direction, but I might have drifted indefinitely, if it wasn\u2019t for Dr. Hemley.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe you know what I\u2019m talking about, if you ever had a teacher who changed your life?\u00a0 I had Dr. Hemley in a sociology course I expected to be a time waster, and an easy A.\u00a0 But then we started studying the comparative sociology of women in world cultures, lots of historical background, and I felt like someone had lit me on fire.\u00a0 I got so full of righteous indignation.\u00a0 How was it possible that in the late 20th century there were still cultures that practiced rituals I\u2019d never heard of, like honor killings and female genital mutilation?\u00a0 Seriously?<\/p>\n<p>So, while my buddies polished their resumes for law school or B-school, I got involved with the National Organization of Women- NOW &#8211; and the local women\u2019s shelter.<\/p>\n<p>I started as a lowly volunteer, answering phones, opening mail, but pretty quickly got drafted to help deal with the actual clients, and my theoretical background slammed into the kind of harsh realities my cushy suburban life up until then had most definitely not exposed me to.<\/p>\n<p>Lying awake at night, I began to ask, how is it possible that women were still getting battered and bruised and raped \u2013 too often by men that they profess to love, who profess to love them?\u00a0 And the law does so little to protect them?<\/p>\n<p>How is it possible that women could grow up in America and have such a low opinion of themselves they truly believe they \u201cdeserved\u201d to get their lights punched out?<\/p>\n<p>Like so many impressionable college kids, I found myself going deeper and deeper into these issues.\u00a0 The injustice of it all fired me up, and I knew I\u2019d found my calling, even though sometimes the pain of it all felt like more than I could bear.\u00a0 I felt like I simply had to bear it, on behalf of those who were powerless to do anything about their own pain.<\/p>\n<p>Deep down, maybe I knew I was feeling the need to fill a void within, to find an answer to that more profound question: Why am I here?\u00a0 My friends were mostly pretty normal.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t seem to have any doubts. They were planning careers and weddings and their own suburban dreams, but I saw the suffering around me and was consumed with guilt for my privileged life.<\/p>\n<p>So, I took on the calling, immersed myself in it, reading everything I could get my hands on.\u00a0 Even my taste in music changed.\u00a0 Where I\u2019d emphatically rejected my mother\u2019s folkie-protest songs, now I listened, with almost morbid exclusivity, to music that touched my heart, music that brought tears of indignation and empathy.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Juarez\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/OYCx5syrjM4?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>So I got my degree and got a great job with NOW, the National Organization for Women, working on legislative campaigns on the state level.\u00a0 Lousy pay, lots of travel.\u00a0 My dream job.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/now.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">National Organization for Women<br \/>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<p>I was a whiz at research, a fountain of information.\u00a0 The internet was just coming into play then, and I took to it right off, instinctively seeing its potential.\u00a0 What a kick, having that much information at your fingertips.<\/p>\n<p>All that advocating for women, all that feminist fire.\u00a0 Looking back I have to smile at the passions of youth, though I don\u2019t regret a minute of those years.\u00a0 And yet, it\u2019s also true a girl gets lonely sometimes.\u00a0 Unlike some of my sisters in the Cause, I never quite lost the perspective \u2013 or the hope &#8211; that there might be good men out there, despite the jerks and patriarchal blowhards I dealt with on a regular basis.<\/p>\n<p>And I never quite stopped hoping to find one of my own.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe, as a child of my gorgeous and charming mother, I never had much belief in my own charms.\u00a0 My work was the perfect place to be, in that sense; I almost managed to convince myself that being sexually alluring was just borderline bad taste.\u00a0 I\u2019m not saying I was bad looking, nor that I didn\u2019t enjoy putting myself together well.\u00a0 I\u2019m just saying that deep down, I think I was operating on the assumption that I just wasn\u2019t the kind of girl who was ever going to attract the guys.<\/p>\n<p>Then I ran into Dale.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"Chapter 1:  Beginnings\" href=\"https:\/\/hanilives.com\/?page_id=43\">&lt; previous\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 <a title=\"ch. 1b    High Hopes and Stumbles\" href=\"https:\/\/hanilives.com\/?page_id=54\">next &gt;<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; &lt; previous\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 next &gt; &nbsp; Prefer to listen?\u00a0 Click here: &nbsp; The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/hanilives.com\/?page_id=32\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-32","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hanilives.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/32","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hanilives.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hanilives.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hanilives.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hanilives.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"http:\/\/hanilives.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/32\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35,"href":"http:\/\/hanilives.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/32\/revisions\/35"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hanilives.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}