Indexes & Polls

What can I say, I'm a lover of polls & indexes because they shorthand
concepts.

Latest index : The Weird-o-Meter (WOM)
The WOM is an outgrowth of the events that led up to 9/11/01. My partner
and I started noticing that things 'seemed weird' in July of that year. I
can't quite put my finger on it but it included the following:
1. the way things were growing in the garden (trees shedding too early,
things blooming too late).
2. Strange behavior of insects (I'm an entomologist or anything...it's just
that we noticed that insects on our property were acting in ways that
seemed different or strange to us.)
3. Our alarm system started going off randomly (they never did find out
why)
4. The television in our living room started going off and on by itself.
we thought it was a short that needed to be fixed but after a month, it
just stopped happening.

While this was going on, we just looked at each other once in a while and
said, "Huh, funny."

Then, in August, the mother of a good friend of ours passed away. She was
91 so that's not so strange. But then my uncle passed away two weeks
later. And then after another week the father of another good friend
passed and then yet one other acquaintance's mother passed away within the
same week. Now all of these people were sick and/or old. So their dying
within the same month period could be simply attributed to morbid
coincidences that happen to people in a particular age cohort. But since
we were feeling uneasy anyway, these incidents increased our level of
anxiety to the point where we started asking others in our social circle if
anything seemed weird or strange lately to them. No one seemed to know
what we were talking about...and so we thought we were just us spooking
ourselves.

And then the planes hit the world trade center.

Unfortunately, I'm feeling an uptick in the WOM index.
Today, the TV started that on & off thing again. So perhaps the short is
back. This morning, a bee, hovered on our front stoop, not zooming here
and there, just hovering...maybe he was waiting for us to put out food for
the stray cat we feed. We'll see. On a positive note, good 'strange'
things are happening too. We've run into alot of old friends; I'm finding
things that I thought were lost years ago...

Quote of the day

"Our destiny is bound up in the quality of our being rather than the list
of things we know how to do. The doing grows out of the being."

--Hilda Lee Dail


I have a text file that holds many quotes I find inspirational, comforting.
Re: my last blog, I am struggling with vague feelings of inadequacy. The quote above is, quite simply, the perfect tonic. The quality of my being is important, not a meaningless set of credentials. Obviously the quality of my remembering leaves something to be desired though! Why do I retrace steps that I've already taken? I can only resolve to remember my own counsel in the future.


Hilda Lee Dail's book, the Lotus & the Pool , helped me immensely a number of years ago when I went through this same funk. It was pointed out to me by a complete stranger in a bookstore and I bought it out of desperation. It ended up changing my life as I knew it then.

Sadly, I discovered that Ms. Dial passed away earlier this year but not
before she did some wonderful work in helping those whose sense of themselves had been mangled.

A good life well lived. Thank you Ms. Dial.

The Problem with Reading Articles from Media Bistro...

Open letter to myself...(Warning, whining below):
"If you continue to read about 22-year-old Princeton grads winning the Pulitzer Prize and future Harvard B school Wunderkind's who plan to write their second New York Times best seller list book while matriculating for a graduate degree in something that will guarantee their ability to obtain elite health & dental care for the rest of their natural lives, you'll be ready to slit your wrists by the end of the day.

Stop it, now."

Whenever I get this desperate, 'my-life-has-been-a-waste' moments, I remember what a psychic once told me: "You have a habit of believing yourself a failure."
'K, yeah I do.

But who doesn't at least a tinsy-tiny bit? The desperation is just a symptom for frustration at all my missed opportunities.

But if I focus on what's in the past, I then continue to miss what is available to me now in, in the present. A freaking uroborous of a situation, eh?

OK. I'll stop whining. And I'll stop reading Media Bistro on Tuesday mornings.