Opinion

While shopping over the holidays, I ran into an old friend. "It's great to see you, but you're literally half the person I remember," I told her. She had dramatically lost weight, having recently undergone a gastric bypass - a stomach stapling surgery performed on obese people to rapidly lose weight.

On Sunday, Jan. 15, Bethany Community Church will host its third annual prayer breakfast honoring the great U.S. civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It will be held at 8:30 a.m. in the Gavilan College Student Union Cafeteria; admission is $25 for adults and $15 for children.

In 1957, musical theatre was dramatically changed with the Broadway opening of multi-award winning "West Side Story". Leonard Bernstein's music and Jerome Robbins' choreography raised the bar for musicals forever.

Does anyone remember the chaos some predicted when the calendar propelled into the year 2000? Now here we are 12 years later, welcoming the New Year.

Four years ago, I wrote a column promoting California's high-speed rail project. I believed then, and I believe now, that linking cities throughout the Golden State with a bullet train that travels from San Francisco to Los Angeles in two hours will provide tremendous economic benefits. Unfortunately, a lot has happened with HSR that has tarnished much of my optimism for the project.

David McRaney, author of "You Are Not So Smart," a book on psychology, insists that procrastination is, in fact, not the result of laziness or lack of time management skills, but rather that, "procrastination is fueled by weakness in the face of impulse and a failure to think about thinking." In addition to love, fear and other familiar emotions I am utterly convinced that procrastination is yet another common denominator of humankind. It plagues both the young and the old, the student and the employee, the homeless and the housewife. But, of course, we all know this.