Category Archives: 100 words or less
Real time
In real time, sometimes, we get our ass kicked. I feel it at the end of every two hour workshop with nine energetic and creative kids I work with on Thursdays after school. I leave it all on the field, and feel like I’ve had my ass kicked and accomplished nothing.
But I remind myself every week, after I revisit the frames and sounds they’ve made, that real-time ain’t the only time. Tweaking, combing and refining, I’m thrilled with what we accomplished, in spite of everything.
Good to remind ourselves to appreciate the blessings we are too preoccupied to recognize.
Experience
Deeply experienced things remain, even years later. The moment, the light, how things smelled, facial expressions, every tiny unverifiable detail is contained in the memory.
I remember sitting on a stone bench on a cool evening, watching a gangly puppy’s uncontrollable excitement as he discovered the delights of eating deer shit. “Let’s not mention this to her,” my friend says, laughing, raising a shot of excellent scotch.
Painful experiences are also in there, no doubt. The blessing is that the beautiful experiences, though sometimes more subtle, more elusive, are just as strong as the other kind.
Random Snapshot of the World
The world is amazing, vast, a miracle, but the world is not necessarily your friend. The universe this world lives in is famously indifferent, why wouldn’t the world be too?
If you’re one of the lucky ones the world calls friend, you may still have days when it answers you like this:
To a fellow blogger and my cousin J
There are two ways people go after being abused as children. Both are difficult, but one is much better than the other.
Some people grow up to abuse others, become nightmare spouses, parents, friends, colleagues, bosses and leaders. They feel they have the right to act like pricks, since life was cruel to them.
Others grow up to defend their loved ones from abuse. They feel obliged to model caring behavior, to protect others. They become beacons of hope in an often indifferent world.
Deep feelings can change our hearts, for better or for worse. But better is better.
KID POWER
Hello, Philippines!
Hello to all my friends on the many islands.
Calmness
Easier to be totally calm during a crisis, sometimes, than in the course of the average day. Might be helpful to think of the churning of the average day as the Chinese character for “crisis” which translates to “opportunity”.
This sleight of hand offers the opportunity to change the way we see the challenge and then, seeing it differently, to treat it with more creativity.
Yah, best to create yourself out of uncalm moments, it seems to me. Going to go do that right now, in fact, after stretching my creaky body a bit.
THIS is the Great Communicator
Like most great modern communicators he keeps his message simple and to the point, and he stays on point.
His primary message is “food, give it to me”.
He also communicates “clean this mess up, now” while indicating his litter box and “I am irresistable and you will do as I say”.
A Novel I’d like to write
The protagonist would be a man who, though gentle, truly did not give a rat’s ass. One of the many annoyances that did not trouble him at all would be the silence of those who knew of his sensitivity to silence.
This would be most vividly seen in the memorable vignette where he blissfully goes about his gentle business while, all around, those closest to him, intractably attracted to their own mothers, are busily having enthusiastic sex with them.
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