Life is for living.
When We Allow Life to Change Us
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man. —Heraclitus
Anyone who thinks that life is too routine and that hardly anything changes has gotten himself into a rut. We can allow ourselves to be numbed by our daily routines, bored with the predictability of our days, and dwell on the many things we don’t have or we’d like to have.
Instead, though, we can notice the richness of each day as we move through it. For me, there are a great many things that pique my attention or give me joy. When I get up early in the morning, I will notice the stillness that rests in the house; somehow that day’s silence has its own soothing quality. Or on my walk, I’ll notice a new blossom on my lemon tree; a walker who has an English mastiff who’s decided to stop and greet me; or an armadillo that scampers blindly to find his breakfast.
Member Post
I’ve been away. My enthusiasm for posting has been tempered by the travesty in the White House: when the administration has a quality of fractal ineptitude that reveals itself at whatever level and aspect one considers, it’s hard to generate the energy for focused criticism. Why, after all, invest more in the critique than they […]
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I’d like to say that it’s rare, but sometimes songs are performed by the wrong people. The “treatment” and production fails the song entirely. Sometimes it’s good! Sometimes, it’s even great…until you hear someone else perform it. Professional or amateur, sometimes …the cover was better than the original. Preview Open
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I’ve been steeped in research, gathering photos, matching likenesses to known persons profiled on Wikipedia, and reviewing maps and dates, all the while praying my mind would eventually wrap itself around the largesse of the story, at least to the point I might tell a story that has coherence, drama, a proper arc, and an […]
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“Healer, Heal Thyself!” or I Hate Taking My Own Medicine
Some people will be amused to know that whenever I get a little too uppity and a little too proud of myself, God finds new ways to make me….compassionate toward others.
Over the last few weeks, I have been in the ER three times. Yes, this is a lot. No, I am not normally a hypochondriac. It has been a bit of a journey.
Wind-down Rituals
In early 2016, not long after we moved to Nebraska, Mr. Midwest and I began what now feels like a sacred nightly routine.
Once my workday is over and my “have-to” list is complete, including some exercise, I leave the home office and join Mr. M (and sometimes my mother-in-law, a.k.a. Bonus Mom, who shares our home with us.)
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Quote of the Day: Life
Titus Livius ,in the introduction to his History of Rome from it’s Founding (Ab Urbe Condita) written roughly around the time of Christ, laid out the cyclical theory of history in its purest form: For true it is that the less men’s wealth was, the less their greed. Of late, riches have brought avarice, and […]
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Member Post
Just a few weeks ago, life would reveal itself as if I were playing a leading role in a technicolor movie. My movie would have surprises, delights and friends of all kinds. We’d all go out to colorful restaurants—Mexican, Asian, American—enjoying bright murals on the walls and savory dishes. My husband and I also had […]
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Testing… Testing…
If I were a certain sort of woman, I’d blame it on The Patriarchy. If I were another sort, I’d blame it on A Culture Insufficiently Supportive of Life. (And, if I were a very specific sort, I’d do both.) Instead, it was the understandable result of The Powers That Be in our neighborhood hospital system not having leeway to make more fine-grained distinctions in a crisis. Which is how pregnant women, who aren’t permitted to receive any in-person prenatal care right now if they have the least little sniffle but no negative lab result for Covid-19, must go through a lengthy, frustrating, and high-exposure screening process to see if they qualify for Covid-19 testing, while the nonpregnant may simply waltz – or rather drive – through safer, low-exposure Covid-19 testing in about 15 minutes.
If you’re pregnant, though, the screening process might take hours, during which you hear, at each step along the way, that you may be ineligible for the lab anyhow – and that’s just your time spent at the walk-in screening center. It doesn’t count the hours (days) you may have spent trying to find a walk-in screening center that hasn’t run out of swabs for the day, and finding out whether you’re even eligible to visit it.
Member Post
To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone and a funny bone. Reba McEntire Preview Open
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Life and Death: A Balancing Act
Death, or the specter of death, has been weighing on my life lately. It feels like a weight that I am able to carry, but one that is sometimes oppressive.
I first noticed it around D-Day. Normally I try to take these events in stride. After all, life and death are inextricable partners, no matter how difficult they may seem. But the thought of soldiers dying in huge numbers, and their leaders knowing that they would likely be sacrificing their lives, was a sad awareness that still lingers.
How do You Choose to See Your Life?
After being in Indianapolis for two days for a wonderful seminar by Hillsdale College, I was going to write a post on the pluses and minuses of our trip. I have about twelve complaints about Delta Airlines in Atlanta just for our return trip, including their not asking local passengers to stay in their seats so the rest of us could try to make our connections; about sending us to a gate where the next flight to Orlando would be leaving, only to find out it was full; about giving us boarding passes that had red streaks that prevented the bar code being read the next morning at TSA. I’m not going to complain anymore than that, although there are lots of other annoying, stupid and inconvenient occurrences. (Did I say we were told to get to the airport at 5:30am for an 8:00am flight??
Okay, now I’ll stop—or I will completely destroy my premise for this post.
Thoughts on Making Friends at Coffee Shops
I was thinking about all the stuff everyone says these days about the loss of community over the last few decades, and about this article I had just read (tl;dr: even the coasty lefties at Vox agree, the Midwestern model works better for people), in which a millennial expresses gratitude for having found community, as exemplified by her neighborhood coffee shop where “everybody knows her name”, so to speak. I (very belatedly) started watching Cheers, curious to see what insights it might offer. I thought back to my own experiences as a busboy and waiter at a restaurant, where it was deeply important to the regulars to know and be known.
I wondered why I didn’t feel that way about any of the local coffee shops I’ve gone to.
I went to a local coffee shop to get some work done. At some point, as a handful of customers and staff concentrated around the bar, one of them asked, “Who’s this quote from?”
Choosing Your Stories
Hollywood is a place of endless stories.
Part of what @davesussman does at Whiskey Politics is cover movie premieres when we get the chance, and the other night Dave and I met at the TLC Chinese 6 (formerly Grauman’s Chinese theater in Hollywood) for the red carpet premiere of Unplanned. The film opens with an emotionally shocking gut punch, then unravels the true story of Abby Johnson, the young director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Texas. UPDATE: Dave Sussman talks about the emotional impact of the movie on radio.
Well, he’s at it again. Gavin Newsom, California’s newly elected Governor, has once more decided his moral sensibilities take precedence over the duly enacted law. Today, March 13, 2019, Governor Newsom, with a stroke of the pen, signed an executive order placing a moratorium on executions. As per Article 5, Section 8 of the California […]
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(1) Sit less. (2) Eat less. (3) No sugar. Preview Open
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Why I Don’t Have a Smart Phone: Five True Stories
1. I was carpooling with some people on a six-hour trip (to Urbana), but before we could start, we had to get on the highway. Our GPS navigator took us right past the highway on-ramp we all knew, down some other road, then on a crazy four- or five-mile detour through other neighborhoods and odd side streets, finally coming full circle, back to the same on-ramp where we had started, which, this time, we took.
2. For the next six hours, an extroverted older guy (maybe in his sixties) sat next to a younger guy (early twenties) and tried to make polite conversation. Even though they didn’t know each other previously, the older guy was friendly and full of energy, and it was clear that he really valued human interaction. The younger guy sometimes engaged, but his talking and even his listening eventually trailed off, as he lost interest in the conversation and paid more and more attention to reading whatever was on his phone. Perhaps unintentionally, the younger guy’s visible boredom sent the message loud and clear that he wasn’t interested in talking to the older guy. I ended up feeling bad for the older guy, and spending a lot of the trip engaging with him, even though we were sitting in different rows and had to crane some to make it work.
3. A friend of mine, a psychologist, notices a trend: She has always had toys available in her waiting room, for any children who come. At the beginning of her career, it was a pretty reliable rule that children loved toys; now, some decades later, children seem less and less interested in the toys, or anything that requires manual dexterity to manipulate or use; the children may pick up a toy briefly, but they become frustrated or lose interest much more quickly, and revert to the one thing that still can hold their interest: a screen.
