Monthly Archives: June 2011

Friday Finds: Super-Awesome Commenter Edition (that’d be you!)

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  1. Cori likes to use words like “kilometre” and “fortitude” and “honour;” and she just might kill me for saying this: She’s making “a solid effort” to run her “arse” off these days and I like to bug encourage her about this. So y’all hop on over to this wildly but forgivably canadian blog and say “RUN CORI RUN!” She’ll LOVE it!
  2. “I was simply fulfilling my Christian duty to go to church”–this is the kind of stuff Prudence writes. Her posts are like onions. Not the red make-you-cry onions, but Sweet Vidalia Onions that grow in my hometown. They are rich and layered. You should check out one or two posts.
  3. 15 minutes a day can add up to a lot of minutes in a month (I don’t do math. And Drew, Mr. 4.0 Math Undergrad, isn’t here to help me. So let’s just say it’s a lot.) Imagine what you could accomplish if you spent just 15 minutes being creative each day. Or just check out The Right Brain Planner’s post for inspiration!

Oh. And y’all. As an added bonus, here are two must-reads: 

  1. Here Be Dragons is brought to us by one of the coolest young ladies I’ve ever had the privilege of waving at across a not-so-crowded Starbucks. But, alas, she’s in a warzone working with the Red Cross and her family now lives in Texas. So I may never see her again in real life. I make up for it by reading her incredible writings about dust storms and books. And it’s never boring. Never with a capital EVER.
  2. The first thing you need to know about Ed Hose is that she is a she. The second thing you need to know is that she is the most talented, sincere, and quirky person I’ve ever had the privilege of chatting with in that aforementioned not-so-crowded Starbucks. By day, Ed is an illustrator. By night, she’s a writer. And apparently nighttime only hits about once every 3 months in her life. So, here’s whatcha gotta do: Go to feedmyinbox.com and tell it to email you the latest on Ed’s blog (http://edhosedrawingconclusions.blogspot.com/) whenever she drops one on the world. Just do it. When have I steered you wrong?
And let me know what you’re reading these days! Let’s swap notes, shall we?

How to find yourself in 30 seconds or less.

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The crickets are still chirping outside, even though dawn moved in about an hour ago. They are stubborn. They are probably begging for the cool of night to stay. I wish my brain had held on to night a bit longer. Morning came too soon, and it brought a headache. A weird headache.

My fingers click the keys with each word, but I don’t often notice. Tap tap tap on “jkl;” as I listen to my own head put words to the sounds my ears are taking in.

The refrigerator. It keeps whirring. Like a fan. Constant. Is it always this loud? I wish it would cool down so I can take in the crickets before the sun warms them into silence. But that whirr…

There’s a thud in my brain that sounds a lot like “I drank too much wine last night.” Only I didn’t. At all. Why this throbbing? Stress? What am I stressed about right now? Ah yes. There are tiny reasons. And there’s a lack of exercise.

And that whirring is getting louder. And it’s starting to ruin my cricket peace. Throb.

With all this awareness, I resolve to exercise today. And take measures that ensure I get more sleep tonight. And head for the Advil. Get out of my way.

Practice the art of listening, moving from outward to inward.

When we really listen with attention and scope, we take in the world with fresh senses. Our awareness is magnified exponentially. We notice signs of life that have always been there, and also notice experiences that come and go at different points in life.  By staring so intently at the world, we begin to see ourselves as well. We realize who we are as we interact with our native world. Our self-awareness peaks.

If you have lost your words, if you are unsure of what to write or express or create, stop and listen. And I don’t mean listen to the refrigerator and crickets. But listen to your own thoughts. Move from outward listening to inward listening. Check your mood, body, anxiety, questions, inner whirring… There’s a lot going on in side of you that you may not be aware of unless you quiet all the other noises and just listen to yourself.

Today’s challenge: take 30 seconds right now. Listen to yourself. What’s going on inside you? What do you hear?

Do you know what they’re saying to you?

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Every single thing you see on-screen came out of somebody’s creativity. It doesn’t exist. Nature didn’t deliver it to us. Everything had to be dreamed.
Jeffrey Katzenberg

“Every movie has a message. Do you think they’d pour millions of dollars into two hours of entertainment if there weren’t multiple purposes for it…?”

She said something like that. My art teacher, who once had dinner with Bob Dylan when he was Bob Zimmerman. She also said I was a fairly talented artist and needed to further explore that area of my life. And then I enrolled in college as a Sociology major.

I wish I believed her about that art stuff.

I did believe her about movies, though. And about Bob. And I’ve never forgotten those Movie lectures, and watching a few clips in our class, and digging for deeper meanings.

This changed my viewing experience. I’d go so far as to say it actually enriched it.

Which is one of the reasons why I have no problems with movies that might have harsh or offensive content (horror movies, in all their excess and unnecessary-ness, excluded). And now every time I watch a movie I look for the message.

Happy Feet, Wall-E, I Am Legend, Castaway, Date Night, Avatar, Gran Torino

All of these movies have profound layers of meaning. Yes, profound. Some of their messages I agree with, and some… well… not really.

That doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’m aware.

It’s interesting how, at a moment when our defenses are down and our feet are up, we’re being handed a message. Somebody is trying to say something to us, and sometimes it is flat-out propaganda.

Have you noticed the hidden messages in movies? When is the last time you watched something and caught the message behind it?

How to dress like a potential candidate for motherhood…

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So, we went to our first official “Hey DFCS, we wanna adopt! Sign us up!” meeting recently.

(See that sentence? Consider that my public announcement that we are adopting. Somebody congratulate the heck out of us.)

The morning started as any other morning, with just a bit more excitement.

I grabbed my go-to attire: t-shirt & jeans.

But I quickly realized, though still too asleep to panic, that this would be a “first impression” moment between us and *them.* And these *them* might be the people that approve our application and work on our referral and help us do this.

I should carefully consider what I wear to the kind of meeting that could change my life forever. No pressure.

My brain flipped through appropriate, catchy, and persuasive t-shirt ideas. I graphically altered some for you, to give you a glimpse into my t-shirt brain:

If only I had a t-shirt designer at my disposal who could crank out one of these designs in 6 hours.

Oh well.

Drew said “dress like a normal person.” But by then my brain was all panicked, and I no longer knew how normal people dressed. I needed to dress like someone with great parent-potential.

I went with something business casual. Kinda. With my black fedora and rockstar bracelets, because… well… I wanted to.

In the end it didn’t matter. The bottom line of the meeting was that, even though DFCS requires us to take training courses before approval for adoption, this region of the state doesn’t currently have the funds to hire an instructor.

Oh government. You vex me. But, more on that later.

All that matters right now is that, come hell or high water, we’re adopting!!