January Wrap

Don't have much for the wrap this month. Been on the mountain a few times, once with both my girls. I don't need to say anything else about how good my life is.

Here's what I got:

When you're carrying your laptop, carry your laptop.

Another bathwater poem:

Make sure you know where the damn baby is

before you start doing anything with that bathwater.

I'm a citizen of the planet, first.

Everyone is doing at least one thing, that someone else thinks is wrong.

I told you not much. Here's some from some real people:

When you are at sea, keep clear of the land. Publilus Syrus.

The biggest, most unquestioned answer of our culture is our relationship with money. It is there that we keep alive -- at a high cost -- the flame and mythology of scarcity. Lynn Twist.

You can't hammer a nail over the Internet. Alan Binder.

That's it for this time.

my best, your bobJuan.

She knew someday she'd have to say "I told you so".

Once again Notso Hung leased the apartment to folks who were troubled. It wouldn't be so bad if he had any balls at all and would lay the smack down on the wayward ones. But Notso Hung is a pussy. Like his parents Unwell Hung and Shi SumWimp before him, he avoids all confrontation. His parents were raised during the final years of the NoCan Do Dynasty. Notso was a dud at birth.

Now he has Himso Dum and his son Sumyung Guy living next door completely out of control. Himso's wife, Shiso Dun left with her lover Himwell Hung two weeks ago. It was then that Notso's wife told him to kick Himso Dum out since it was just going to spiral out of control with no woman in charge. Of course Notso knew she was right, she was always right, and she knew he wouldn't do anything about it, he never did anything about it. Notso also knew it wouldn't be long before he'd hear how right she was again. He was glad she was in charge anyway.

This morning when Shiso Dun snuck into the apartment to steal her baby Sumyung, she found her little sister Shiso Yum in bed with Himso Dum. Gi Sus, you should have heard the racket. It was so bad Notso called the police; a rare display of courage. Himso tried to escape through the window with Sumyung. Fortunately the swat team was there to catch the little boy while Shiso Dun grabbed Himso Dum by his hair and dragged him back into the apartment.

Later they all thanked the brave swat officer MiLong Wong, for he saved SumYung Guy just as he was coming out the window. MiLong stayed around and encouraged Notso Hung to give the eviction notice. He was there too, to get another glimpse of Shiso Yum who was still undressed. Notso told Himso he was terminating the lease. When Himso asked why, Notsu turned to his wife and said, because Shi Sayso.

Picture found here:

Just Who Do You Think You Are?

This morning I finished reading The Wisdom Of Insecurity by Alan W. Watts for probably the 5th time. Amazon says I purchased the book in 2003. Hmmmm. I've read most of his other books too.

He deals with identity and time, and God really, afterall. He explains that perhaps man's biggest problem is one of identity. The idea that we are a separate "I". Who is that "I"? You can't have an "I" without all the rest of it, you can't separate "yourself" from all the rest of it. I'll stop there.

Here's some excerpts that I enjoyed this time thru:

... our age is one of frustration, anxiety, agitation, and addiction to "dope." Somehow we must grab what we can while we can, and drown out the realization that the whole thing is futile and meaningless. This "dope" we call our high standard of living, a violent and complex stimulation of the senses, which makes them progressively less sensitive and thus in need of yet more violent stimulation. We create distraction - a panorama of sights, sounds, thrills and titillations into which as much as possible must be crowded in the shortest possible time.

To keep up with this "standard" most of us are willing to put up with lives that consist largely in doing jobs that are a bore, earning the means to seek relief from the tedium by intervals of hectic and expensive pleasure. These intervals are supposed to be the real living, the real purpose served by the necessary evil of work. Or we imagine that the justification of such work is the rearing of a family to go on doing the same kind of thing in order to rear another family ... and so ad infinitum.

After all, the future is quite meaningless and unimportant unless, sooner or later, it is going to become the present. Thus to plan for a future which is not going to become present is hardly more absurd than to plan for a future which, when it comes to me, will find me "absent," looking fixedly over its shoulder instead of into its face.

But in the process of symbolizing the universe in this way or that for this purpose or that we seem to have lost the actual joy and meaning of life itself. All the various definitions of the universe have had ulterior motives, being concerned with the future rather than the present. Religion wants to assure the future beyond death, and science wants to assure it until death, and to postpone death. But tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live. There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.

Death is the epitome of the truth that in each moment we are thrust into the unknown. Here all clinging to security is compelled to cease, and wherever the past is dropped away and safety abandoned, life is renewed. Death is the unknown in which all of us lived before birth.

Nothing is more creative than death, since it is the whole secret of life. It means that the past must be abandoned, that the unknown cannot be avoided, that "I" cannot continue, and that nothing can be ultimately fixed. When a man knows this, he lives for the first time in his life. By holding his breath, he loses it. By letting it go he finds it.

As long as you do not know how to die and come to life again, you are but a sorry traveler on this dark earth. Goeth.

The highest to which man can attain is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes him wonder, let him be content; nothing higher can it give him, and nothing further should he seek for behind it; here is the limit. Goeth.

It is obvious that the only interesting people are interested people, and to be completely interested is to have forgotten about "I".

Pic found here.

Singleton Mom's 3rd Annual Walk

Click on Michelle's Pic to go to my Fund Raising Page. Help me raise the money for the moms again this year!