Just when you think anti-gunners couldn’t make themselves sound more obviously stupid. Good reason to get a Finnish passport. 🙂 Four minutes. Four. To crack Obamacare “security.” Eh. No surprise, really. Fools. I became a writer by accident. For two years, I wouldn’t admit I was one because in my experience, they were mostly a bunch of drunken ne’er-do-wells. But maybe that’s a good thing. This focuses on what will trigger the next stock market mess. Implications (about triggering effects) go way beyond that. You’ll see what I mean. How to get rich and stay rich Again, not what you’re…
Category: Mind and Spirit
Spirituality, moods, feelings, and thinking free to live free.
This is so short and so delightful I’m reprinting it in full. If you wrote this and object to my reprint, please let me know. It’s been getting around a lot. —– Empathy Test By George R. Shirer The assessor is attractive in a button-down kind of way. Blonde hair, pink jumpsuit, digital makeup set to minimal. Her face is a sculpt, something from one of the mid-level catalogues. Attractive, but not too attractive. The same face you see on a thousand other people. Only her eyes, brown and liquid, are original. “You failed your empathy test, Mr. Clawford.” Her…
I can tell you what living boldly is not.
Living boldly is not flinging yourself randomly at every injustice or every cause. That may be bold. But it ain’t livin’. And it’s not effective at creating freedom. (To paraphrase the great trickster Abbie Hoffman: Random action produces random results: Why waste even a rock?.)
Living boldly is not being obedient while waving your arms and ranting about how bad everything’s getting. (Not even if you rant really, really forcefully and get lots of hits on your blog and have lots of followers on Twitter.)
Living boldly is not flipping off cops just to show you’re brave and defiant.
Living boldly is also not being forever strong and fearless. You can live boldly and still have weak moments, emotional meltdowns, failures, self-doubts and plenty of 3:00 a.m. fears for the future. (Ask me how I know.) Living boldly is what you do in spite of all that.
Living boldly is creating your own life in your own way, even if you’re depressed, discouraged, defeated, and downtrodden. Even if you fear — or are downright dead-solid certain — that the whole damn world is doomed.
You wonderful people. You’ve seen me Definitely Not At My Best twice just since New Year. And … well, you wonderful people. That’s all I can say right now. There will be more soon on that and other things. But for now … on with the blogging, the linkage, the trivia, and the dogs … Um. Well. On the topic of that E.C. I so recently maundered about: How to deal with an existential crisis. Illustrated, yet. Thug sues Nike for not posting a warning on its shoes that they could be dangerous if used for face-stomping. Things you never…
First thing: Thanks for your patience. Thanks for your support, both moral and material. Thanks for keeping the conversation going while I was away. Thanks to you most awesome people for fixing Joel’s eyeballs (even if he’s not feeling so good about it at the moment).
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Now, that said, I’m afraid I have to go ahead and have my existential crisis right in front of you. Which is, as I say up there in the headline, embarrassing.
It’s embarrassing having the crisis at all. It reminds me of my senior year in high school during which I was not only in a perpetual E.C., but pretentiously name-dropped Sartre and Camus to illustrate just how Deep and Profound my teen angst was. (I won’t do that on you now, I promise. Nevertheless, if you hate maundering confessionals, you might just want to skip this post.)
It’s even more embarrassing having an E.C. in public now that I’m a grownup. But I’m a writer and I find that the process of being a writer sometimes involves dumping out the contents of my brain in print.
This week I’ve got an article due. I’m halfway through it. But I’m not going to be able to finish until I empty all the brain junk and sort out what’s worthwhile and what’s not.
As soon as I post this, I’m going to make Thursday’s “bad” post public again. If clever people and hobby-horse riders want to make the comment section All About Them, that’s on their heads, not mine. Your encouragement, good cheer, and wisdom delivered via email and via comments on yesterday’s apology post helped me get over myself. (The irony was not lost on me that I squealed like a little girl over comments on a post titled “Live Boldly.” It was amazingly nice of y’all not to mention that. 🙂 ) I’m still going to take a week off. I…
This is a companion piece to Tuesday’s “Live deliberately.” Part I defines the problem. Part II is a challenge to become the solution.
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Twenty years ago, when the Internet was barely a thing, Jeffrey R. Snyder set Fidonet and Usenet groups afire with his essay, “A Nation of Cowards.”
Snyder demolished the then-common advice, “Don’t resist criminals. Just give them what they want. Your life is more valuable than your property.” He wrote in no uncertain terms that meek submission diminishes and devalues life. And personal character. And culture. He went on to nail virtually all “gun control” as hokum. Elitist hokum. Deadly hokum.
The 9/11 hijackings (in which the majority of those airline passengers fatally followed recommendations not to resist) put an exclamation point on Snyder’s message about handling criminals. Twenty years of gun-rights activism wrote Snyder’s message in bold and underlined it.
Today, violent freelance crime is down and every crook with half a brain knows that he may lose the other half to an armed homeowner, c-store clerk, or concealed-carrying pedestrian.
Yet more than ever, we are a nation of cowards.
Kurt Hofmann: “Resolved to be a gun criminal.” Well, now there’s a resolution that should be pretty easy to keep! Starbucks orders little pub to cease and desist. Little pub tells Starbucks … This cop n gun story is so scary-weird on so many levels, I can hardly believe I exist in the same universe with it. (H/T Hobbit) Take this FWIW, but here’s a former cop on how to behave if somebody puts a gun to your head. The one time something like that happened to me, calm (which said cop recommends) was definitely an asset. But I was…
So your boss is nagging you for that overdue report and you know when you get home you have that worsening plumbing leak to repair. The kids are at that awkward stage (and have they ever not been?) and the spousal unit (or non-spousal equivalent thereof) gives you the dagger-eye for not being attentive enough.
The cause you most cherish in all the world is making so many demands on you that you start to wonder how you ever came to love it that much. Meanwhile, you never know what the NSA, the TSA, the ATF, or the IRS might spring on you tomorrow. But whatever it is or isn’t, you fear it. You tell yourself you don’t, or you shouldn’t. But somewhere in that one, obscure private corner of your soul that ought to belong to you alone, you fear it.
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Unlike most of you hereabouts who don’t make New Year’s resolutions if the comments are representative, I do make them. Ellendra was about the only commentor on the same bandwagon. (Hi, Ellendra!)
Like everybody else who tries, I also fail at them. But I’ve found they keep me pointed in the right direction. In time, resolutions … resolve. It might be in a different way than you imagined or at a much later time than you hoped. But … you get there.
This year, though, I found myself down to the true stubborncusses of resolution-making. Those ones I’ve made year after year to no avail. The ones where I’ve gone so far as to post behavior schedules above my desk or slap Post-It notes on the bathroom mirror, only to find myself ignoring them as thoroughly as if they were written in Cantonese.
If you made stuff like this up for a movie, it would be too ridiculous to believe. The NSA intercepted shipments to insert backdoors into electronics. (H/T JB in comments) Thirty-eight hauntingly abandoned places. Wendy McElroy: “The Redistribution of Dreams.” So well said, so sadly thought. New Years resolutions and free will. And to close with an awwwwww: dog escapes his new home and returns the shelter … for love. (H/T BW)