Things To Do Today
Mamacita says:
1. Change your clocks.
2. Put new batteries in all your smoke alarms and clocks.
3. Remind yourself to vote on Tuesday.
4. Remind your spouse/partner/roommate/POSSLQ/whatever to vote on Tuesday.
5. Remind your neighbors to vote on Tuesday.
6. Remind your co-workers to vote on Tuesday.
7. Go into the voting booth with a positive attitude. Voting is a right, and the very fact that Americans HAVE rights is a privilege indeed.
8. Remember, people who choose not to vote forfeit all whining rights for four years. No vote = no whine.
9. In fact, whenever someone tries to talk about politics, interrupt them and ask them if they voted. If they say “Well, no, but. . . .” tell them to shut up. Shake your head sadly while you do it. If someone doesn’t vote, his/her opinion has no credibility. None. Zip. Zero. Nil. Nada.
10. Don’t forget to vote. The fate of the universe is in our hands; let us not fail to take that responsibility seriously.
11. Don’t get all huffy when you’re asked for ID at the polls. People are cheating all over the place, and it’s just a little thing to make sure you’re who you say you are. I know you’re honest, but some people aren’t. You don’t mind showing the WalMart cashier your photo ID, and this is a much bigger deal than that.
12. After you vote, feel proud, and feel privileged. Other countries’ citizens would give a kidney to be allowed to vote for their leaders. Even if neither candidate is exactly what you would have wished for, you still need to vote. Don’t let other people make these decisions for you. Get out there and let your voice be heard, even if it’s only by pushing a few buttons. Big things happen sometimes when the right buttons are pushed.
Quotation Saturday
Mamacita says: I have just realized that I didn’t update much last week! That is very unlike me, as most weeks I jabber on and on daily, saying whatever is on my mind without regard to propriety or political correctness.
Last week was midterm exams, and it was a busy week, even though during said exams all I could do was sit there and watch my students’ faces as they filled in 100 bubbles: bubbles that, for some of them, determined whether or not they would be permitted to remain in college. No pressure.
Last night I was too busy participating in Fausta’s VERY haunted Halloween podcast, after which I had important business at Rusty’s Bar, after which we went bowling even though it was well after midnight. Yes, I am a very wild woman! And it was so good to hang out with my wonderful friend Linda and her daughter Bess, who is MY daughter’s best friend. And where was MY daughter while l was hanging out with her friend? I have no idea. Something about a big costume party, whatever. 🙂
Today my entire body hurts, and how sad is it that I am in pain from BOWLING??? I am such a slug.
Ah, Quotation Saturday again, already.
1. I do honor the very flea of his dog. –Ben Jonson
2. The highest happiness of man. . . is to have probed what is knowable and quietly to revere what is unknowable. –Goethe
3. I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. –James Baldwin
4. Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature. –Tim Robbins
5. There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated. –Charles Dickens
6. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos. –Mary Shelley, as Victor Frankenstein
7. An important part of who you are is what you want to be. –Amy Kampert
8. We must beware of needless innovations, especially when guided by logic. –Winston Churchill
9. Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game. –Goethe
10. What is the use of inventing a better system as lon gas there just aren’t enough folks with sense to go around? –Dorothy Canfield Fisher
11. Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads. –Thoreau
12. The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness. –William Saroyan
13. You miss 100% of the shots you never take. –Wayne Gretsky
14. There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others. –Montaigne
15. Love is a transitive verb. –Anon.
16. Life is an adventure in forgiveness. –Norman Cousins
17. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls a butterfly. –Richard Bach
18. Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week. –Alice Walker
19. Life is easier to take than you’d think; all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable, and bear the intolerable. –Kathleen Norris
20. With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die. –Lincoln
21. Stars may be seen from the bottom of a deep well, when they cannot be discerned from the top of a mountain. So are many things learned in adversity which the prosperous man dreams not of. –Charles Haddon Spurgeon
22. Once must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. –Nietzsche
23. In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place. –Gandhi
24. We attract hearts by the qualities we display; we retain them by the qualities we possess. –Jean Baptiste Antoine Suard
25. Nothing hits harder, or sticks longer in the memory, than a quotation. –Sir James Augustus Henry Murray
26. He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind. –Samuel Johnson
27. It is better to stir up a question without deciding it, than to decide it without stirring it up. –Joseph Joubert
28. Quarrels would not last long if the fault were only on one side. –La Rouchefoucauld
29. Often, it is the most deserving people who cannot help loving those who destroy them. –Herman Hesse
30. As I get older, I’ve learned to listen to people rather than accuse them of things. –Po Bronson
31. I began writing poetry when I realized I was dead. I am now slightly more alive. –Humdrumirkso
32. Nobody can become perfect by merely ceasing to act. –Bhagavad Giba
33. Get as mad as you like, but never get off the payroll. –Damon Runyon
34. Let no one underestimate the need of pity. We live in a stony universe whose hard, brilliant forces rage fiercely. –Theodore Dreiser
35. The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one often comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won’t. –Henry Ward Beecher
36. Whenever you see persecution, there is more than a probability that truth is on the persecuted side. –Hugh Latimer
37. There are three kinds of people in the world: the wills, the won’t’s, and the can’t’s. The first accomplish everything; the second oppose everything; the third fail in everything. –Eclectic Magazine
38. Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it. –George Bernard Shaw
39. A man’s feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world. –George Santayana
40. Never think that God’s delays are God’s denials. Hold on’ hold fast; hold out. Patience is genius. –Comte Goerges Louis Lecterc de Buffon
41. What God is to the world, parents are to their children. –Philo
42. A panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination. –Christian Nestell Bovee
43. Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is a speaking picture. –Simonides of Ceos
44. What men usually ask for when they pray to God is that two and two may not make four. -Russian proverb
45. I have lived to thank God that all my prayers have not been answered. –Jean Ingelow
46. I cheated in the final of my metaphysics examination. I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me. –Woody Allen
47. Miracles do not happen in contradiction to nature, but only in contradiction to that which is known to us of nature. –Saint Augustine
48. One lives in the hope of becoming a memory. –Antonio Porchio
49. The earth has music for those who listen. –Shakespeare
50. We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over. –A. Bevan
I am in mourning for my friend Bruce Hewetson, who passed away last Tuesday. Sometimes, life just hits us smack in the heart, with no warning. I suppose if there were sufficient warning, our hearts might be better prepared, but then, if we were always prepared for pain, we would not be able to enjoy the happiness as much. I know for a fact that Bruce was a happy man who loved his wife and family dearly.
Truth be told, I am also in mourning for another friend as well. My heart aches at this loss, also.
We are never really ready to lose someone we love, are we. And there are all kinds of loss.
You People Make My Ass Twitch
Mamacita says: Bonus points if you know the source of the title. It’s one of my favorites!
Perhaps it’s just because I’m a humorless old woman with no life, but I honestly do think that deciding to sleep in on the day of your mid-term exam was a really bad idea. I also think it might have been worth the excruciating pain your hangnail and hangover and sore throat and deep throat* (who do you think you’re trying to fool?) would have given you, to come to class and take your test. The room is large enough that you could have sat in the back and kept your germs to yourself, and when you were finished you could have taken a nap, completely undisturbed. Yes, I did receive your email explaining how you had to work late last night and were really, really tired, and when the alarm went off you just couldn’t get up, you just COULDN’T, so for the sake of your health you turned over and went back to sleep, and you thanked me in advance for understanding because you know I remember how it felt to be young and so tired it just wasn’t humanly possible to get up for just a test. I didn’t answer it because it’s hard to type when you’re laughing that hard.
I remember being so tired it wasn’t humanly possible to turn OVER, let alone get up. But I got up anyway, because I had responsibilities. I sleep-walked across campus many times, to take a test. I took tests with migraines so severe there were sparks shooting out of my head and I could barely read the questions. I took tests that I’d pulled two or three all-nighters in a row to prepare for, and I really believed I was prepared! I have fallen asleep with my head resting on my completed test. I never once cut class on a test day, even though there were plenty of times when I wanted to.
I think a great way of telling whether a person is an adult or still a kid is watching him/her to see if he/she is, on a regular basis, dragging the ol’ carcass out of bed to do something because it’s there to be done, you’ve committed to doing it, people are waiting for you to get up and get there to do it, you signed up to do it, you promised people you’d be there to do it, you paid money to do it or you’re being paid money to do it, and by golly you’re just SUPPOSED to be there to do it. No excuses.
Teenagers really do need far more sleep than even a baby, and they seldom get it. Many adults don’t understand this, and they insist that a teen GET UP on a Saturday morning or a vacation, because YOU’RE WASTING HALF THE DAY! COME ON, GET UP, THERE ARE CHORES TO BE DONE, ETC ETC ETC and these things can’t be done at nighttime, apparently. . . . Plus, there’s the absolutely ridiculous early-morning start of high school, which most experts agree is detrimental to most teens’ body clock and yet school systems insist on it, mostly for the convenience of the bus drivers and families who rely on their older kids to babysit the younger kids after school. Doesn’t anybody care about our sleepy teens? An average teenager’s body requires ten to fourteen hours of sleep sometimes! Why won’t some parents let the kid sleep? Just, you know, leave the kid alone and let him SLEEP? Wasting the day? Some people are night owls, plain and simple, and sleeping when they’re the most tired is just logical. Not everybody loves the early morning. I don’t. I hate it, in fact. “Jane, you’re wasting half of your Saturday!” No, I wasn’t. My Saturday was divided differently than certain other people, that’s all. And at nine or ten p.m., when those people were curled up in bed, I was just beginning to be at my mental-alertness peak. I’m still that way. Teens are wasting good daylight hours when they could be DOING something? No, they’re not. Teenagers desperately need that sleep, so leave them alone on their days off and let them sleep. It doesn’t do any good to insist that a kid go to bed earlier, either. Most of the time, a kid just isn’t sleepy enough to go to bed earlier. Mother Nature is a wily old thing and wired us all differently, sleep-needs-wise.
So who’s right and who’s wrong? Nobody, of course. But far too many adults can’t fathom a kid who wants to sleep so much. Nay, a kid who MUST sleep so much. I understand it completely. I sympathize. I’m all for leaving the kid alone and letting him sleep. He needs that sleep. He needs hours and hours and hours of blissful uninterrupted sleep, far more than adults need. Leave the kid alone and let him sleep!
Unless, of course, the kid, of his own free will, signed up for a job, or a degree, in which case, the kid needs to be there, #2 pencil in hand, or spiffy uniform donned and ready to fry, right smack when he/she contracted to be there, or else. Part of becoming an adult is forcing oneself to do things one really doesn’t want to do, simply because it’s the right thing to do. Many forty-year-olds still haven’t learned this.
HOWEVER, if that’s the case, these kids should have signed up for the midafternoon or evening class, not the morning class. And since they did sign up for it, they need to honor their commitment. Most of my students have jobs. That’s good. All teens should pay for their own car insurance, dates, and fast food with the pals. But if a kid can get up for fast food with the pals, the kid can get up for class.
Especially on midterm day. Because, you know, there are no makeup tests for the sluggards. And a person of any age, past eight, who doesn’t keep his/her promises and honor his/her commitments and do what he/she knows is the right thing, is a person who makes my ass twitch. Not the good way, either.
*PLEASE take a shower before you come to class. Nobody wants to breathe the aroma of stale tuna for three hours before noon. Or any other time. Ick.
You know, my older students never do this. Hmmmmm.
