Sometimes I feel great guilt for not being more productive at work. I check off lots of small tasks and meet deadlines—often just barely, but I spend a lot of time spinning my wheels and thinking. Thinking counts, too, I suppose. Or at least it should.

Garrison Keillor wrote a piece for Salon a few months back that seemed a little barbed. He wrote about how young people have an inflated sense of entitlement at work and want “creative, flexible jobs.” He wrote that all of them want to be writers, and he seemed to be disparaging that idea.

I know the entitlement part was the core of what he was getting at, because he’s a champion of the liberal arts and English majors specifically, but the words still stung. He wrote about how hard our fathers and grandfathers worked (and our mothers without pay at home) in uncreative, inflexible jobs so that we wouldn’t have to. And he pointed out that many of them enjoyed their work.

But somewhere, something shifted, and many of us wanted something different, something more. The idea of going off to a job where workers check in and leave their creative brains at home is such a recent development, but we think already that it’s the way things have always been.

None of my grandparents lived that way, and neither did their parents before them.

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was an important film because it was on the cutting edge of a new trend, and that wasn’t so long ago.

Transparent is the word that keeps coming back to me. Our ancestors’ lives, until just the last 75 years or so, were transparent. They grew food and ate it or sold it. They traded skills in things they liked and knew how to do well for the few things they couldn’t produce themselves. Some people had enough money to pay others to do their work, but not so much the ones I’m descended from.

Maybe—and I hope so for their sakes—they didn’t have this panicky feeling that they were giving away years of their most productive time to things that just didn’t matter and weren’t real somehow. I hope they knew that their work did something that counted--that mattered.

I, on the other hand, am a cog in a machine I don’t believe in or support. I am surprised at myself that I’ve now spent 20 years working almost exclusively for schools when I’ve had so many objections to them all along. I want to get my kids out and as far away from schools as I can. I don’t trust other people to look out for them and expose them to good ideas anymore. And it isn’t just a local problem. I’m not keen on where schools are going anywhere else, either. So what do I do?

I teach freshman composition part-time at a college, and I really like the work. To get a fulltime gig in higher ed, I'd need an MFA or a Ph.D. in English. (I have a master's in English in professional writing, but not enough formal literature credit to pass muster for most college English jobs.)

I look at Ph.D. programs and worry that I’m nowhere near smart enough to pursue that route. And I don’t know how I’d ever pay off more student loans when college teaching starts out paying so much less than K-12 jobs.

Then I see what passes for thinking in classrooms and think I must be smart enough.

I have Big Ideas about all that I see that needs to be changed, but I don’t know solutions that don’t require scrapping everything and starting over.

How do I create a life that feels real, authentic, and significant?

How do I use what comes easily to me and what I enjoy doing to pay a mortgage and the debts incurred from years of soul-sucking jobs that didn't pay enough to keep us afloat anyway?

“And now, ladies and gentlemen…JESUS H. CHRIST!!!”

The spotlights swirl around the stage while the band plays the theme from “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Jesus enters from the left, arms spread wide. His hair is cut in a feathered short ‘do, and he sports a neatly trimmed goatee. He wears a snug-fitting white suit with a black tie. He looks somehow preppy and Vegas at the same time.

There’s a smattering of applause. Someone yells, “Seen it! When you gonna update the act, JC?”

Jesus high-fives Elvis after his big entrance and slides onto a barstool next to the King.

“I learned a helluva lot about marketing from YOU, my friend. What’s a deity gotta do to get a drink around here?”

Buddha, mindfully washing glasses behind the bar, shrugs and says, “Manifest it yourself, big guy.”

The TV was tuned to CNN. The regulars at the bar like to watch the news to make bets on who’s next. Elvis is nursing a drink and watching, bleary-eyed.

“How about Roy Scheider?”

Jesus, always the know-it-all, says, “Not yet. You’re thinking of the Law and Order guy.”

“Yeah, I mix them up. Reagan hasn’t been as much fun as I expected.”

“The man was cheerful for a long time. You don’t expect him to stay chipper for all eternity, do you?”

“That Tammy Faye’s a pistol, though. She stayed at the karaoke machine for about three days after she got here.”

“The really sick ones always party hard. They just feel so much better, I guess. That’s the part I wish the families knew. They’re all mooning around wearing black and feeling bad while the dead ones are up here doing the limbo.”

“Uh-oh. Here comes Steve Irwin. He’s still mad at me about losing that bet. Gotta fly.” Elvis slaps his money on the bar and shambles off. He’s wearing rubber flipflops with the white jumpsuit and gives a little hop as he pulls the fabric from his butt and walks away.

It’s important that you appear to sympathize with the terrorist on the street—the regular Abdul-Exploding-Belt types—For heaven’s sake, roll up the sleeves of that robe.

The World Cup was very popular among our supporters. Would it kill you to work a “Go Italy” button into the folds of that turban?

Our focus groups indicate that our younger demographic is greatly enamored of this Johnny Depp fellow and the whole pirate aesthetic. We suggest that you braid a few strands of your beard and add some beads. Older brethren may also have residual positive associations with Bo Derek in this regard. It’s win-win.

Rebelling against me should involve wearing kelly green and pink with pearls, investing in Big Oil, voting Republican, eating meat, and vacuuming.

Instead, rebellion has manifested itself in my house as a penchant for eyeliner, facial piercings that have to be removed before visiting grandparents, music seemingly without melody, and a strong desire to live in the crush of city crowds.

While I read books on home midwifery and holistic healing, my daughter signed up for what the high school brochure unsettlingly referred to as the “health occupations tract.” (I tried to justify that spelling; I really did. After all, students traverse the hallways of their high school and are eventually spit through the orifice of graduation, if all goes well. That could be a tract of sorts.)

While I think modern medicine is often intrusive and goes looking for trouble to overprescribe and treat unnecessarily, she thinks doctors and hospitals are hella cool and watches surgery shows that leave me squeamish.

While I dreamed of finally owning my own exotic chickens, collecting their eggs, growing organic vegetables, and tend to lapse into rapturous squeals of glee when I can point to all the food we eat that came right from the backyard, she dreams of apartments and houses with postage-stamp yards where people walk by on too-close sidewalks at all hours. She wants traffic and noise while I count rooster crows and listen for the hummingbirds at the feeders.

While I dream of moving ever further from civilization, Montana maybe, or high in the mountains and living off the grid, she craves nightlife and people.

I can’t get far enough away from others, and she wants to move closer.

I just knew that even though biology and psychology and a lot of other –ologies I can’t spell all say that our kids have to decide we’re hopelessly lame or they’d never get their own apartments, I thought we’d navigate that time easier than regular people because I’m so freakin’ cool. I got it. I knew what was important. I was an artist dreamer, just like they would be.

Guess not.

I get the jokes on Family Ties reruns now. There’s a subtext I never noticed when I just had a crush on Alex Keaton. You should watch. It speaks to the whole parenting experience in a profound way.

I heard an author on Fresh Air on NPR say that from the time they can crawl out of our laps, kids are telling us in a million different ways, “I’m not you.”

And that hurts our feelings because we thought we were making a series of Mini Me’s.

Understanding that it’s part of the natural order doesn’t help much. Just like having a baby is a tremendously Big Deal when it’s your turn to do it, so is every other milestone we know is coming. Just knowing we’re in line with the regular lockstep order of things doesn’t make any of those steps one bit less wrenching.

And like I’ve said, WE WERE SO COOL. We were different. We had values and ideals and hallucinogenic drugs that really worked. Who would want to rebel against that?

So is this just a pendulum cycle over and over again? Crass materialism and focus on this world in alternation with a dreamy metaphysical focus? Or was that boomer focus on the universe just a blip – an anomaly that will disappear as we all dodder off into the sunset on our tie-dyed walkers?

I hope not. We had such great and noble ideas. We weren’t practical, but we changed the world, often for the better. Some of the changes have taken longer than we would have liked, but they’re there, all the same.

Even at the start of the current collection of wars, were there any true hawks, anyone who really wants to bring harm to civilians we don’t know? It seems that our attitudes toward killing, other than in Texas and Virginia, where the state still executes an awful lot of people to keep the rest of us in line, has evolved.

There seems to be a general understanding of basic human rights, and the debate is more about the finer points of making fair treatment a reality than debating the need for it to exist. That’s progress.

The concern with the environment has become much more universal, with only Michelle Malkin and a few others claiming that what hurts big business hurts the Earth. We don’t seem so out there anymore.

Even our understanding of Eastern ideas like karma are mainstream sitcom fodder. We knew The Secret before it was a blockbuster and a movement. You get what you give. And what you expect to get. We got that.

And we all knew that if we kept the clothes long enough, they’d come back around.

Maybe the kids don’t know the struggles for women’s rights and civil rights and the ones for artistic and philosophical freedom because we’ve protected them the same way our parents sheltered us. We grew up sure that there would be enough to eat, that the economy wouldn’t crash, that there would always be enough—of everything—to supply our needs. Our parents told us often in our own rebellious phases that it wasn’t always so, and they knew we didn’t understand all they’d experienced. They were right. We were right. And, as far as something to rise beyond that we don’t know about yet, our kids will be right, too.

Maybe THAT’S the trend: each generation protects its young from the evils it knows, and the young grow up to conquer a new set of evils. By the time our grandchildren and great-grandchildren go through the process, maybe there will be less and less evil to vanquish. Maybe things are getting better all the time.

But our music was still better. Melody, you know.

St. Patrick’s Day in Chapel Hill is a raucous evening out.

I was on a business trip alone, hoping to find something quiet and exotic for dinner.

I walked past two different men dressed as leprechauns, both of whom seemed much more grim than that little guy who hawks breakfast cereal on TV. I wondered if perhaps their outfits were the consequences of lost bets. They didn’t seem open to any of the jokes that came to mind, so I held my tongue.

The Irish pub on the corner had a white tent set up in the alley. Inside, patrons wore green shamrock beads and a pair of musicians played fiddle tunes while two preteen girls Riverdanced with their arms welded to their sides.

It was crowded. It was loud. It was smoky. And, since I don’t eat meat, the only thing on the menu I could eat was Welsh rarebit, which I remembered gave Gomer Pyle nightmares. I looked around at the rowdy crowd and decided that holiday or not, I needed to celebrate more sedately.

In the next block I found what I was looking for: a Vietnamese restaurant called Lime and Basil. You can’t get much greener than that.

Inside there were only about eight tables. Soft music played, and an intelligent college-town crowd said smart things like, “I enjoy the work. I just don’t understand the nomenclature.”

I ordered jasmine tea that smelled like flowers every time I took a sip. My dinner was lemongrass stir-fried with tofu and jasmine rice. When the young waitress left the plate on the table and softly encouraged me to “Enjoy!” I waved the steam toward me just to drink in the aromas. If I had been yanked from my chair by the Rapture at that point, those heavenly smells might well have been enough.

I ate too quickly for the waitress, who frowned at me sternly and said as much. She was right. I had wolfed almost all of it down because it was such a delicious combination of delicate flavors.

And I was distracted by the woman who didn’t understand the nomenclature, who was describing how her traveling companions miscalculated the value of the Euro and overpaid for a pizza in Florence.

You don’t find ambience like that on St. Patrick’s Day just anywhere.

My dinner cost $13.00 with tip, and I had a little to carry back to the hotel for a cold snack later. Most dinner entrees at Lime and Basil were less than $10.

There were plenty of vegetarian and vegan choices on the menu, giving it five carrots on the Veg-o-Menu scale.