Overcoming a Dysfunctional Litter
To thine own self be true. –Shakespeare We all have, to some extent, skewed perceptions of ourselves that don’t quite agree with reality. Challenging someone’s self-perception can be a dangerous thing to do. Have you ever made what you thought was a harmless or obvious comment, only to have a person turn on you like [...]
Since Peggy died on September 29, I’ve been struggling. Jim and I have both been struggling. We’ve been sad (of course), but mostly we’ve been kind of…flailing. Feeling lost and purposeless. Like nothing was ever going to be okay again. I’ve been thinking a lot about my own mortality, trying to come to terms with [...]
I’ve spent the last five days saying good-bye to a dear, dear friend with cancer. She isn’t the first person I’ve known to die of this awful disease, but she was the closest. I got to be with her and hold her hand and see her frighteningly rapid decline and feel her fear and suffering. [...]
A friend of mine just had his 20-year high school reunion. He didn’t go, having no interest in seeing people he never talked to in high school to begin with, but one of his friends did. The report on it was less than stellar, and the guy who went seemed kind of sad and lost [...]
I’ve recently gotten hooked on Sex and The City reruns, thanks to my TIVO. At first it was a guilty pleasure, but I’ve decided that this show celebrates some lovely and important feminine ideals, like friendship, self-esteem, and unapologetic sexuality, which are all paths to self-acceptance and maybe even (eventually, and with the right focus) [...]
Several years ago, I decided to become a vegetarian for moral reasons. I had become aware of practices in raising animals and in slaughterhouses that appalled me, and I decided that it was morally wrong to consume animals that lived and died in fear and misery. I thought it would be easy: just cut meat [...]
(Or: How to do Several Things at Once, All of Them Badly) When I was a kid, I remember my father saying about one of my less introspective friends that “she’d go nuts if she had to be alone in a room for more than half an hour.” This was an ominous foretelling of what [...]
There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist. – Ayn Rand A couple of years ago, I was talking to a friend about motorcycling. He and his wife both ride, as do my partner and I, and he was telling me about a conversation his wife had had [...]
Virtue is its own reward. –Proverb A close friend of mine got caught up in the poker craze that’s swept the world in the past five or so years. He studied the game voraciously, reading every book he could find, participating in online forums giving and receiving feedback, and becoming part of a community of [...]
People are often unreasonable, illogical and self-centered Forgive them anyway If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives Be kind anyway If you are successful, you will win friends, some false and some true Succeed anyway If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you Be honest and frank anyway [...]