Hope is not a prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizon.
It is inhumane, in my opinion, to force people who have a genuine medical need for coffee to wait in line behind people who apparently view it as some kind of recreational activity. – Dave Barry
Last Tuesday I took care of two important civic duties. I voted and gave blood in the same afternoon.
When someone tells me they “gave blood,” I immediately view that person in a new light. I see them as someone engaged in a noble and honorable act, someone making a selfless sacrifice for the benefit of their fellow man.
I’ve been waiting for several weeks now for Treasury Secretary Paulson to call me to ask for my ideas on how to save the U.S. economy. I know the man is very busy and all, but all I’d need is about half an hour.
I skipped church the other day and instead took the dog down to Pritchard Park for an early morning walk on the shoreline.
The poem says the Buddha said
There is a theory which states that if anyone ever works out exactly what the Universe is for, and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable. There is another theory which says that this has already happened. – Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God.
The other day I helped my son Adam move into the house he will be occupying this year with six other Gonzaga University sophomores, and the experience was an interesting case study in nonlinear behavior. By way of example, if you or I bought a bookshelf kit and brought it home and emptied the contents of the kit on our living room floors, we would probably feel inclined to put the kit together to get it out of the middle of our living room floor. We might even fill the bookcase with books, which, presumably, is the reason we bought the thing in the first place. I learned last week that neither my son nor any of his roommates are afflicted with such traditional notions of linear behavior.
I don’t know about you, but I’ll never forget where I was when I watched the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. I was in a Super 8 Motel in Ferndale. Being only a couple miles from the Canadian border added a certain international cachet to glamour and glitz of the experience, as did the slightly fuzzy reception of the television set bolted to the dresser of my room.
I turned 53 recently, and as part of my weeklong birthday celebration, the woman whose husband I am and I and half a dozen friends all went to the Woodland Park Zoo to see Emmylou Harris in concert.
As I write these words, I am on the cusp of starting an extended vacation. I’d call it a “well-deserved” vacation, but I don’t know if the available evidence would support that claim. Continuing an ancient and time-honored tradition that I started last year, I went to Eagle Harbor Book Co. the other day to pick out a little vacation reading material. I already have in my possession an unopened copy of Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” which I received as a birthday gift from the woman who is my wife, which gives me a big head start on my holiday reading list.
Here’s something: Did you know that the sedentary lifestyle of your average bivalve has caused it to develop a very simple nervous system, a nervous system so simple that it does not even include a brain? As those of you with access to Wikipedia know, bivalves are aquatic mollusks with two-part symmetrical shells. Popular bivalves include our friends the scallop, clam, oyster and mussel. Although scallops can swim, most bivalves spend their lives firmly attached to flat surfaces or buried in the sand, feeding themselves by siphoning off passing particles, reproducing asexually, and getting by just fine without a functioning brain. The more I learn about bivalves, the more they remind me of my high school friend Reuben.
