To the Ladies of Writing Plans, Proposals and Presentations.

 This will in all probability be my last blog post for quite some time. Though, as I said in my opening blog I do love to write, I find this venue too demanding  time wise. Hopefully I’ve entertained those few of you that actually read these posts.

I am nearing the end of this process and will finish my BA in December. It may be of some interest to you girls that I was the only guy in my very first class at Avila and here I am, near the end, I am once again the only guy in a class.  Just like that first class I am impressed by the classmates I have. You are all attractive, intelligent, driven ladies who have found the grit and determination to get your degree inspite of so many other commitments you have.  Traditional students have no idea how hard this is. I applaud you and wish each and every one of you the very best in your future endeavors. I wish I had been smart enough to get this done years ago but life seemed to always get in the way.

Writing is an art and like most art forms the more you practice the better you will get. I have long loved the way words can transport us to distant places and show us things that we might otherwise never see and experience. Words are the keystones to everything around us, without them societies don’t exist, great nations don’t rise and fall, nothing endures even a little while. So practice, write, any way and anywhere you can. By write I was once told it doesn’t matter what you write, just the act of assembling words to carry a meaning is enough. I spent ten painfully boring years as a technical writer it was challenging but soon became repetitive BUT it was writing and just concentrating on, is it complete is it concise does it make sense was enough to make my writing much better. So I say again just write, let your imagination go, create images from your mind or just write out business letters, the process will make you better

Many of you have finished your degree and most of the rest of you are close so, unlike that first class I was in, I don’t worry about life distracting you and preventing you from finishing. You can do it, whatever IT may turn out to be. I encourage each of you to think about your futures and write down your goals. Tuck those goals away someplace only you will know about them and then work your goals.  In this day and age you ladies have more doors open to you than ever before and I encourage you to kick open any you find still closed. You do have what it takes.

In November I will turn 60 years old and if you believe in statistics you all know that I am suppose to think and act in a certain way because I am an older white male living in the Midwest. I chuckle when I read some of these surveys because what I think and feel to be important is so far outside those parameters as to make me one of the “outliers” that statisticians tend to write off as being unimportant. To be honest with you I think there are more guys like me out there than the statistics show. What I am so awkwardly trying to say is gender should never ever be part of anyone’s decision making process. You all have the knowledge, that piece of paper that they say you must have, and the experience they can’t get from a traditional college graduate. I encourage all of you to use those tools to make your dreams come true.

I will be watching from somewhere near the back.

You can be anything you set your mind to be.