One of my mantras that I offer to myself and my friends and colleagues at school is “a bear is not going to eat you.” Taken from Merlin Mann, it’s the notion that we respond with fight/flight reactions to many things in our lives that are not, in fact, actual threats that match such a …
I recently saw a blog post about making sure that the first thing you do in the morning is produce rather than consume. Now, my typical morning starts with me reaching for my phone and checking mail, or my rss feeds, or Facebook or Twitter . . . or, actually, all of those before even …
We tend to think about ourselves, our identity, as a noun. A thing. A quantum of personhood. It is, however, not all that deep to realize that it may be more advantageous see our identity as a verb, a process, a doing. We are what we do. But we are also, I think, where we …
The dude incorporates the tuning pegs into his composition, need I say more?
This is a lovely story that made me smile:
It all started two years ago at Corner Perk, a small, locally owned coffee shop, when a customer paid her bill and left $100 extra, saying she wanted to pay for everyone who ordered after her until the money ran out. The staff fulfilled her request, and the woman, who wishes to remain anonymous, has returned to leave other large donations every two to three months.
“People will come in and say, ‘What do you mean? I don’t understand. Are you trying to buy me a coffee today?'” the shop’s owner, Josh Cooke, told the local news. “And I say, ‘No, somebody came in 30 minutes ago and left money to pay for drinks until it runs out.'”
It took a while, but word has started to spread around the tiny coastal town, home to about 12,000 people. Now, more and more customers have been leaving money to pay for others’ food and drink. Cooke says some people don’t even buy anything when they come in; they just stop to donate and head right back out.
There are days when I am a bit overwhelmed by the PhD process and life in general and I spend about thirty seconds wondering why I keep doing the sound production for PodCastle when I have so much other work to do. Then I quickly remember a) I really enjoy the work, b) I really …
One of my favorite authors, Jonathan Carroll posted this on his Twitter feed and I just had to share.
Such a simple gesture, but I would bet that it caused dozens, if not hundreds of people to smile and increased the amount of joy in the world by a small, but meaningful amount.
So, I’ll try to honor this and approach my day with the attitude of “yes.”
Yesterday was a bad day. I felt alone, disconnected, and grumpy about the world and my place in it. Today is . . . better. I’m not, to be honest, jumping with joy, but I feel a bit more grounded and less angry at the world. Sometimes, it’s enough to have an ok or mediocre day.
That said, this did make me smile yesterday. I posted it a couple of other places and the cuteness quotient is damned high, but still. Ignore the notion that they are “making out” that’s just silly.
Starting a new story is like starting a new relationship: all giddy and exciting and fumbling. For my writing today (I’m trying to get back into writing at least 300 words every day—not ambitious but manageable while doing grad work), I started a new story called “The Lock”. I don’t think it will be a …
When I was in high school, and later at the University of Rhode Island, Brendan O’Malley was a huge figure in my life. We weren’t close friends, though we did hang out occasionally. Mostly our interactions came through drama club in high school and the theatre department at University of RI where he was consistently …