"As it is better to lie squeezed in a narrow bed and be healthy than to be tossed with disease on a broad couch, so also it is better to contract yourself within a small competence and be happy than to have a great fortune and be miserable." Epictetus
Where is your competence? Although you might be good at many things you can never be in control of things that are beyond you. The best driver in the world is at risk when he crosses paths with the worse driver in the world.
Maintain a narrow focus on your goals and do not let them depend on things that you have no control over..
Monday
15 minutes to spare
That's the time I have right now to write something.
Any time spent on writing is time well spent in my book.
I've been daydreaming a lot lately about buying another car, you know, something I don't need.
I have no particular car in mind just an idea about driving a gas saver about half the time.
It will pay for itself, provided it only costs about two thousand dollars, gets at least thirty miles per gallon and will go twenty-five or thirty thousand miles in the next two years without a break down.
There are a lot of numbers to crunch to work everything out. I have not yet considered a motorcycle even though I already have several. Must be the approach of winter.
A motorcycle is possible but you have to account for the tires, if you can get in a lot of miles you will be replacing the tires every year.
Anyway it all boils down to a simple distraction.
I am easily distracted. I can spend my time in completely useless ways. It just happens.
I guess I lack focus.
I should be focusing on the things that will make my life better. Instead I go off on a tangent and think and plan in great detail something that will never happen.
There are a lot of plans in my past.
That is when I need something or someone to bring me back. Too bad someone or something rarely shows up. I have no solution for this problem.
If you do then it is probably in your character set and you should thank God everyday.
Any time spent on writing is time well spent in my book.
I've been daydreaming a lot lately about buying another car, you know, something I don't need.
I have no particular car in mind just an idea about driving a gas saver about half the time.
It will pay for itself, provided it only costs about two thousand dollars, gets at least thirty miles per gallon and will go twenty-five or thirty thousand miles in the next two years without a break down.
There are a lot of numbers to crunch to work everything out. I have not yet considered a motorcycle even though I already have several. Must be the approach of winter.
A motorcycle is possible but you have to account for the tires, if you can get in a lot of miles you will be replacing the tires every year.
Anyway it all boils down to a simple distraction.
I am easily distracted. I can spend my time in completely useless ways. It just happens.
I guess I lack focus.
I should be focusing on the things that will make my life better. Instead I go off on a tangent and think and plan in great detail something that will never happen.
There are a lot of plans in my past.
That is when I need something or someone to bring me back. Too bad someone or something rarely shows up. I have no solution for this problem.
If you do then it is probably in your character set and you should thank God everyday.
Thursday
flu
I've been telling people about the flu.
I've painted a dark future in my rants.
I add that the worse may not happen at all, but...
Since I wrote about it here a few postings ago I won't say anything more about it.
The bad possibilities are endless though and you should look into it.
It hasn't crossed over to us yet so you have time to prepare.
Prepare you must because if the worse happens there will not be anyone to help.
I've painted a dark future in my rants.
I add that the worse may not happen at all, but...
Since I wrote about it here a few postings ago I won't say anything more about it.
The bad possibilities are endless though and you should look into it.
It hasn't crossed over to us yet so you have time to prepare.
Prepare you must because if the worse happens there will not be anyone to help.
Wednesday
almost
Last time I went to the grocer I almost got mad and walked out.
Almost.
I went through the self-serve checkout and for a moment I felt my blood boiling. Just for a moment.
You see I scanned my card and then I spun the carousel around and fluffed open a couple of bags. That caused a sensor to trip so I turned and looked at the attendant, took a minute, then he came over.
He said, "You have to remove the item you put in the bag."
I said, "I spun it around and opened a couple of bags. I didn't put anything there."
He started looking things over. He looked in the bags, he looked in the back, he leaned and peered.
"I didn't put anything there bud."
I'm thinking, "If this kid doesn't stop looking and turn the machine on I'm out of here. If he says anything about removing the item again, I'm out of here!"
Then I stopped.
I'm here all of the time and this kid is just doing his job. Don't worry about it.
My feelings subsided, I checked out and walked away. Right there I was thinking that I didn't want to be like that Aussie I wrote about below who got mad at me when I asked him to please not spam me.
Control yourself Chris, no one is out to get you.
A few nights later I saw a show called the 'Half Ton Man' about a fellow who weighed 1,072 pounds when they got a forklift and hauled him off to the hospital. What was amazing was his attitude later on after he had lost 4 or 5 hundred pounds. He said if anyone tried to tell him what to do that was it, he'd get them and he was going to do what he pleased.
I would say that this poor guy is a pretty good example of where a defensive attitude will get you.
This is a bit like the good attitude, bad attitude thing. People get along just as well in life no matter their attitude and I suppose the same is true for people who upset themselves over what other people say. They get along just as well as those of us who don't care much what other people say.
Well, that's where I hope I stand anyway. Don't let it bother you.
Almost.
I went through the self-serve checkout and for a moment I felt my blood boiling. Just for a moment.
You see I scanned my card and then I spun the carousel around and fluffed open a couple of bags. That caused a sensor to trip so I turned and looked at the attendant, took a minute, then he came over.
He said, "You have to remove the item you put in the bag."
I said, "I spun it around and opened a couple of bags. I didn't put anything there."
He started looking things over. He looked in the bags, he looked in the back, he leaned and peered.
"I didn't put anything there bud."
I'm thinking, "If this kid doesn't stop looking and turn the machine on I'm out of here. If he says anything about removing the item again, I'm out of here!"
Then I stopped.
I'm here all of the time and this kid is just doing his job. Don't worry about it.
My feelings subsided, I checked out and walked away. Right there I was thinking that I didn't want to be like that Aussie I wrote about below who got mad at me when I asked him to please not spam me.
Control yourself Chris, no one is out to get you.
A few nights later I saw a show called the 'Half Ton Man' about a fellow who weighed 1,072 pounds when they got a forklift and hauled him off to the hospital. What was amazing was his attitude later on after he had lost 4 or 5 hundred pounds. He said if anyone tried to tell him what to do that was it, he'd get them and he was going to do what he pleased.
I would say that this poor guy is a pretty good example of where a defensive attitude will get you.
This is a bit like the good attitude, bad attitude thing. People get along just as well in life no matter their attitude and I suppose the same is true for people who upset themselves over what other people say. They get along just as well as those of us who don't care much what other people say.
Well, that's where I hope I stand anyway. Don't let it bother you.
acceptance
"If there is a key to my progression, I think it is in the fact that I never accepted any sort of constraint but immediately moved out beyond it. For me 'can't' simply isn't acceptable, and I urge my students to get it out of their vocabulary. I want them to kick against any boundaries that are set up and to figure out how they can shift resources to move beyond them. It takes imagination and hard work because, as far as I'm concerned, there have been no good solutions to problems that haven't demanded a lot of hard work." Shirley Brice Heath, linguistic anthropologist, quoted from Uncommon Genius by
This woman grew up without access to most of the things that enrich our lives. This she found to be unacceptable.
A lot of us our poorer simply because we were not poor to begin with. We found what we were given, from cradle to grave, an acceptable life. We had things all of our live, never really went without, never really hungry, never too much apprehension about the course our life might take.
If everything were acceptable, why would you try to change it?
Tuesday
simple
"Life is basically pretty simple. You get up in the morning, you do the things you have to do and if you have time you do some things you want to do. You try not to hurt people and you help them if you can. Then you go to bed." Dean Sluyter, the zen commandments.
I like this.
All laid out for us, crisp clean and lean.
Pretty close to what I do.
Except it is a little late in the morning when I get up and I don't manage to do what I have to much less what I want to.
I really try not to hurt people, I say please because I try to play nice, I hold back the desire to tell people stuff in conversation, I don't use the really obscure words I know because people are already put off by the ones I do use, I don't call people names, I stand and listen.
Nevertheless I run into people all of the time who are acting hurt in some way by life.
Expectations can be blamed. People are upset because their expectations are not met.
Not that people expect a whole lot, they just expect everything in some particular order that they have imagined.
Let the world do something different and they rail against it.
Set your own expectations in general, not particular, terms.
Self Development
I like this.
All laid out for us, crisp clean and lean.
Pretty close to what I do.
Except it is a little late in the morning when I get up and I don't manage to do what I have to much less what I want to.
I really try not to hurt people, I say please because I try to play nice, I hold back the desire to tell people stuff in conversation, I don't use the really obscure words I know because people are already put off by the ones I do use, I don't call people names, I stand and listen.
Nevertheless I run into people all of the time who are acting hurt in some way by life.
Expectations can be blamed. People are upset because their expectations are not met.
Not that people expect a whole lot, they just expect everything in some particular order that they have imagined.
Let the world do something different and they rail against it.
Set your own expectations in general, not particular, terms.
Self Development
Thursday
back in the news
It's flu season!
Concern over the spreading bird flu in Asia is on the rise.
"Raising fears of a deadly flu pandemic, President Bush said Tuesday that he is considering the use of troops to impose a quarantine in the event of an outbreak." Knight Ridder
The President has recently read about the Spanish Flu and it scares him. If you read about it you might find reason to worry yourself.
Not only will a flu pandemic kill millions of people, it will also bring the world economy to it's knees. Enforced quarantine means you cannot go out of your house, you better be stocked with food. You will not be making any money so you will not be able to pay your bills. Hopefully the water works and the power plants will be kept up and running, at least for a while. If the supply lines for either one are damaged, there may not be anyone to repair them.
This is change in a big way.
The rest of this article is something I wrote on February 5th of this year.
I am always surprised by the number of people I know who won't get a flu shot. (Not counting this years vaccine issues.)
I had a friend who was in the army in 1918, he had some first hand experience with the Spanish Flu.
First of all you should know something about this flu. It picked the healthy adults not the weak elderly or the undeveloped children. It killed 200,000 Americans in October 1918 alone.
It killed 675,000 Americans altogether and up to 50,000,000 (50 millions) worldwide.
Here is an account of the illness by Isaac Starr, 3rd year medical student, University of Pennsylvania, 1918.
"As their lungs filled … the patients became short of breath and increasingly cyanotic. After gasping for several hours they became delirious and incontinent, and many died struggling to clear their airways of a blood-tinged froth that sometimes gushed from their nose and mouth. It was a dreadful business."
My friend, serving as a messenger rider in the Army, was given the grim assignment of tagging the dead bodies of fellow soldiers who had died of the Flu. He went to the building where the bodies were awaiting shipment back home for burial. There he found so many that they were actually stacked on top of each other. He began the grim task of trying to identify the poor boys but made little progress. After hours of work he had managed to tag just a few, many of the bodies were so disfigured by the disease that he could not identify them. He then decided to get the job done so he just tagged each body with a name on his list. Something like this probably happened in Army camps and in hospitals all around the country.
We often think of ourselves as being on top of the food chain. We aren't. Viruses are on top of the food chain and they have no instinct for survival, they reproduce, they mutate, and they don't worry about killing the host.
'Flu' comes every year but it isn't just the flu, it is a number of new variants of the flu, and they are different every year and someday it will be a monster like the Spanish Flu and it will kill millions of people.
And it will kill someone reading this now.
Concern over the spreading bird flu in Asia is on the rise.
"Raising fears of a deadly flu pandemic, President Bush said Tuesday that he is considering the use of troops to impose a quarantine in the event of an outbreak." Knight Ridder
The President has recently read about the Spanish Flu and it scares him. If you read about it you might find reason to worry yourself.
Not only will a flu pandemic kill millions of people, it will also bring the world economy to it's knees. Enforced quarantine means you cannot go out of your house, you better be stocked with food. You will not be making any money so you will not be able to pay your bills. Hopefully the water works and the power plants will be kept up and running, at least for a while. If the supply lines for either one are damaged, there may not be anyone to repair them.
This is change in a big way.
The rest of this article is something I wrote on February 5th of this year.
I am always surprised by the number of people I know who won't get a flu shot. (Not counting this years vaccine issues.)
I had a friend who was in the army in 1918, he had some first hand experience with the Spanish Flu.
First of all you should know something about this flu. It picked the healthy adults not the weak elderly or the undeveloped children. It killed 200,000 Americans in October 1918 alone.
It killed 675,000 Americans altogether and up to 50,000,000 (50 millions) worldwide.
Here is an account of the illness by Isaac Starr, 3rd year medical student, University of Pennsylvania, 1918.
"As their lungs filled … the patients became short of breath and increasingly cyanotic. After gasping for several hours they became delirious and incontinent, and many died struggling to clear their airways of a blood-tinged froth that sometimes gushed from their nose and mouth. It was a dreadful business."
My friend, serving as a messenger rider in the Army, was given the grim assignment of tagging the dead bodies of fellow soldiers who had died of the Flu. He went to the building where the bodies were awaiting shipment back home for burial. There he found so many that they were actually stacked on top of each other. He began the grim task of trying to identify the poor boys but made little progress. After hours of work he had managed to tag just a few, many of the bodies were so disfigured by the disease that he could not identify them. He then decided to get the job done so he just tagged each body with a name on his list. Something like this probably happened in Army camps and in hospitals all around the country.
We often think of ourselves as being on top of the food chain. We aren't. Viruses are on top of the food chain and they have no instinct for survival, they reproduce, they mutate, and they don't worry about killing the host.
'Flu' comes every year but it isn't just the flu, it is a number of new variants of the flu, and they are different every year and someday it will be a monster like the Spanish Flu and it will kill millions of people.
And it will kill someone reading this now.
Wednesday
blog spam
Rex and I have noticed with complete disdain worthless comments made immediately after a posting on our blogs.
These comments all follow a pattern, "I like your blog!" "I've bookmarked it." "Please visit mine." "Here is where you can find it." I call it blog spam.
They never say anything about the posting. I don't think they even read the posting. This is just another form of spam.
Too bad.
There is an endless string of people using the internet for one purpose, they are trying to get something from you, usually your money.
Usually I just delete this tripe but a couple of days ago a blogger from Australia posted just such a useless comment. I looked him up, went to his blog and made a comment on his most recent post asking him to please not make such comments on my blogs.
You would think that I punched his mother in the nose.
He sends me a letter complaining that I am too sensitive, I don't know why, and that if I can't take it then I shouldn't be on the web. And of course, he finishes by calling me a name.
Well I don't know what he means when he says I can't take it since there was nothing personal in his comment at all. It was just blog spam. I like your blog, come look at my website. Yada yada yada.
I reply, look fellow, if you really looked at my blog that's fine, but your comment looked a lot like blog spam. I'm sorry if I offended you. Here is an example of what I mean. I did a cut and paste of some other blog spam so he could see. I said I was sorry if I was wrong, again.
He wrote back. Your this, your that, yada yada yada. That means he wrote back and called me a bunch of names. Charming, them Aussies. Some people can be very brave when they have thousands of miles in front of them.
If I comment on someone else's blog, it will be about their posting and they can look my blogs up by visiting my profile. I won't ignore their post just to say 'Look at me! Look at me!'
Thanks, but no thanks to blog spam.
These comments all follow a pattern, "I like your blog!" "I've bookmarked it." "Please visit mine." "Here is where you can find it." I call it blog spam.
They never say anything about the posting. I don't think they even read the posting. This is just another form of spam.
Too bad.
There is an endless string of people using the internet for one purpose, they are trying to get something from you, usually your money.
Usually I just delete this tripe but a couple of days ago a blogger from Australia posted just such a useless comment. I looked him up, went to his blog and made a comment on his most recent post asking him to please not make such comments on my blogs.
You would think that I punched his mother in the nose.
He sends me a letter complaining that I am too sensitive, I don't know why, and that if I can't take it then I shouldn't be on the web. And of course, he finishes by calling me a name.
Well I don't know what he means when he says I can't take it since there was nothing personal in his comment at all. It was just blog spam. I like your blog, come look at my website. Yada yada yada.
I reply, look fellow, if you really looked at my blog that's fine, but your comment looked a lot like blog spam. I'm sorry if I offended you. Here is an example of what I mean. I did a cut and paste of some other blog spam so he could see. I said I was sorry if I was wrong, again.
He wrote back. Your this, your that, yada yada yada. That means he wrote back and called me a bunch of names. Charming, them Aussies. Some people can be very brave when they have thousands of miles in front of them.
If I comment on someone else's blog, it will be about their posting and they can look my blogs up by visiting my profile. I won't ignore their post just to say 'Look at me! Look at me!'
Thanks, but no thanks to blog spam.
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