25th
May 2013
I don’t usually have much trouble figuring out things to write about. Every now and then, though, I wind up with a serious case of writer’s block. The most expedient antidote to this affliction is to pick something random and follow wherever it leads. Today, after several days of wrestling with this post, I had to go with my old standby method and pick a random book from the shelf to use for inspiration. And today’s book is My Side of ... (Continue reading)
Sometime after my family started traveling, my sister and her husband began traveling full time as well. They now travel with their two children, my two-year-old niece and my four-month-old nephew. My niece has spent a surprising amount of her life traveling from place to place. She handles moving pretty well, and seems to like it. It’s just a part of how her life works. Another part of how her life works is that from time to time we all end ... (Continue reading)
The word altruism is defined as concern for another without regard for injury to oneself. It is used, usually in psychology, to describe heroism—the act of risking your life for somebody else’s. The man who coined the word was Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism. Comte was by no means a great moral leader, or even a good one. He, like many other scientists of his time, was of the opinion that there was no knowledge outside of human experience and ... (Continue reading)
When the biggest of my little brothers read The Hunger Games his main complaint with the story was that it was not realistic. Obviously, The Hunger Games is a fictitious trilogy. My brother’s problem was not with the idea of a game show wherein all the contestants are trying to murder each other, nor with the unbelievable advancements in medicine or cosmetics, nor even with the invisibility-enabled hovercrafts. His argument against the story was that the world would never and ... (Continue reading)
Yesterday I was sitting in a fairly uncomfortable chair in the dentist’s office with my mouth full of dental equipment and a couple pairs of hands. As I sat there, without even the ability to say “ouch,” I was struck by a feeling of helplessness. In addition to being unable to speak, I couldn’t see what was happening. I could hear, but since the language being spoken was dentalese, the only thing I knew was that the procedure had something ... (Continue reading)
Every hero in every story worth telling has at least one thing in common with every other decent hero ever written. Each one must face an enemy that is absolutely, one hundred percent matched to his own skills and strengths. This is the one enemy that can utterly destroy the hero, the one enemy that he must face alone, the one enemy he must defeat, and the one enemy he cannot possibly defeat. It is, of course, himself. The idea that ... (Continue reading)
A few weeks ago I began the gargantuan task of liberating my family’s books. They were jailed several years ago when we began traveling full time. Books have to be looked after and, with the house empty ten months out of the year, they just wouldn’t be safe on their own. So we tearfully locked them up in boxes, selecting only two hundred or so of them to come exploring with us. This year, we expect more frequent visits to the ... (Continue reading)
Yesterday, my sister (who is no longer pregnant), my new nephew, my niece, my brother-in-law, and I went grocery shopping. This was my sister's first post-baby shopping trip and, understandably, she got a bit tired about three quarters of the way through. She decided to go sit down and leave my brother-in-law and me in charge of finishing the shopping and looking after the kids. Just a few minutes after my sister left us, the ... (Continue reading)
When a person gets everything that she wants, when she has all the things that she thinks she needs, and life is being wonderfully kind; when there is nothing terrible hanging over her head and no looming catastrophe, she might say something along the lines of “it feels just like a fairy tale.” When her lucky streak is over in a day, a week, a month, a year, when life is no longer handing her everything on ... (Continue reading)
Running a phone line is, according to every tutorial on the internet, one of the simplest, most basic, and least dangerous wiring tasks that an amateur can attempt. There are only two wires involved—a red one and a green one. The task begins with simply locating the Network Interface Unit (the outside portion) and the phone jack that the wire has to go to (the inside portion). The Network Interface Unit gets unplugged from the network, so as to prevent ... (Continue reading)
A few weeks ago on my birthday, a bunch of friends and I got together for drinks and ...
When I was growing up, my immature self believed that the family rosary was something that had to ...
"I'm heartbroken to announce that last week, we discovered a crushed consecrated Host beneath one of the kneelers," ...
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. - ...
Several years ago, when I was working on a community theatre project, I overheard two little girls having ...