The pursuit of happiness
One of my goals this year is to learn how to be happy independent of others. I’ve been around the block long enough to have heard that happiness can be manufactured–that you can make yourself happy. But like so many others, it turns out, I have convinced myself that such happiness is artificial. If you [...]
All the Thom that’s fit to print
If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold. Just who said the above is not certain, but it’s very, very true these days. Google gives us lots of cool tools for free, but they gather all the information we give them and sell it. Their motto is [...]
Valentine’s Day 2012
There are plenty of songs I wish I could say I’d written. There are many songs that can say what I feel better than I could ever capture in words. One such song is Ghazal (Love Song) by Tangerine Dream. It comes pretty close to capturing the sweeping power of true love. Love starts out [...]
Facebook Offensive
There is an old maxim: Never discuss religion or politics. Somewhere along the road we seem to have added the corollary “Except on Facebook”. I haven’t conducted an actual survey, but I would guess that as many as a quarter of all posts I go through in a day are commenting on one of the [...]
Richard and the Bee
As a parent there are times you just have to cross your fingers, pray, and hope for the best. We had such a situation this week. Our youngest–and most shy–child decided to enter the school spelling bee. His division would include not just first graders like himself, but first, second and third graders together. And, [...]
Who is the hero?
I’ve recently been listening to a podcast on writing presented by Brandon Sanderson and several other writers, in which they discuss a different aspect of writing each time, in about fifteen minutes per post. In one such post the were covering heroes, protagonists, and main characters when it came out that they didn’t consider Aragorn [...]
Civil discourse
This segment is hilarious! I have no idea if this lady is for real, a good sport, or an actress, but this is just too good to not post: EDIT: The embed doesn’t seem to work. Here’s the link to the video.
The science of self-discipline
It’s still January, and many people have already made, or are about to make New Years Resolutions (I’m in the ‘about-to-make’ group). So it’s helpful to find this article by John Tierney from the New York Times on how to improve your odds of keeping your resolutions. He goes to the science behind it all. [...]
Christmas gratitude
I don’t want to go into the the Christmas weekend still grouchy about Congress. I’d much rather focus on the good things in life, because if I stop and think for even a moment I can come up with a considerable number of things to be grateful for: I live in a country where, as [...]
In defense of introverts
I am an introvert. I admit it with pride. It takes work to be an introvert, but not as much work as it would take for me to be an extrovert. I can be extroverted, but I’ll be wiped out for the rest of the day. CarlKingdom.com has a great post about the 10 Myths [...]
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