On Saturday, I had a plan for yesterday afternoon. Since I hadn’t made much headway on Friday with my seminary-class work, i would read backwards through my assignments: textbook chapter, three essays, and the Acts of the Apostles. And after weeding the front yard for a solid three hours with My Sweetie, I nailed down […]

On the massage table, I started thinking about repetition. Jacob T has very large hands, perhaps as big as my feet, and deploys them with long, sturdy strokes. Which is what I want in massage, so that’s all good. And then he uses those same strokes in the same places for perhaps three times longer […]

The most powerful technique I learned in psychotherapy was the ‘broken record‘. You can use it anywhere, but it’s especially helpful for exchanges (they’re not really conversations) that routinely go in directions you Really Don’t Like. A lot of the negative games—and even some of the past-times—described in Games People Play are great candidates for […]

I’ve begun a timelog for the week; it’s part of one of the podcast thingies I’m listening to. Given my impatience over how I’m handling my time since classes began, I thought it might help: either I’ll see what unhelpful slop I’m doing, or I’ll have data with which to subdue my inner critic. In […]

On laundry days I do a lot of process analysis. Mostly this is because I can’t help myself; I seem to be wired as well as trained to look at any given activity sequence and puzzle out how to do it differently. So that it’s better in that moment. I have always suspected this is […]

[three_fifth] I am really, really glad I’m reading this book. It is a slow, because thoughtful, read, but worth it. Worth keeping it past the two renewals I had allotted. Worth having my library decide I’ve lost it, and bill me for replacement + handling. Not worth having this bill go to collections, however. So […]

I don’t think this is a 3am idea. I think this is a 6am idea…but it’s now past 7pm, so it may share all the liabilities of 3am ideas. Plus I didn’t actually wake-wake up until 7:40am today (hurray!), and perhaps idea-liabilities are accrued if there’s any unconsciousness between idea and execution. Wait, that doesn’t […]

On the way back from errands, I again passed the huddled body of a skunk on th side of the road. I felt sad for that huddle, for the suffering that preceded its death. I once hit a cat, hard, and its last minutes are embedded like a thorn in my memory. It was a […]

My ROI post struck a chord with some of my fam…My Sweetie made a point of mentioning it to me, and my sister emailed me a discussion–that is, if we had been together, we would have rapidly worked various strands, overlaps, and implications out loud, but we weren’t, so this proxy had to do. Has […]

Today in seminary-class we spent some time on Mark 8:34, “Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’” The second half, and what follows, is the hard part. The whole “pick up a […]