Well…this one was supposed to be about the idea that I may have been hasty in condemning Obama about the tax cut deal…but I’ll get to that later…this one is a little more existential, a little more introspective than normal but thoughts have been popping into my head for a couple of days now that I need to write about to figure them out….sometimes that helps but it’s not guaranteed but I’ll try anyway. Part of this thought comes from a couple of encounters I’ve had in the past couple of weeks where the people I met always ask the same question first: “what do you do?” Up until now, my flip answer has been ‘whatever I want”, but, when I started to think about it today, of course my strange thought process drove me to the larger question of how we define ourselves; how do we get to the shorthand that explains us as individuals? I know a lot of people believe that it’s our work that defines us…that it is hard to separate what you do from who you are….so who are you when you don’t have anything that you do? Since I started to write in earnest in my 30′s, I’ve always thought of myself as a writer who worked at other things so I could write, but can you consider yourself a writer if you’ve never sold anything? And, if I’m not a writer, what the heck am I? Just another unemployed old guy I guess….hmmm….this isn’t going anywhere right now so I’ll stop….