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Archive for October, 2005

Make your own costume

"During my teen years, for Halloween, I went as a registered voter." – Martha Plimpton There’s just nothing more depressing to me than half-hearted Halloween costumes, those teenaged boys with a toothpick hanging out of their mouth who say they’re a hillbilly or kids who’ve done nothing but take a pillow case from Mama’s bed to hold all the loot….
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Frame your storyboard

“Not equal to Not metaphor Nor standing for Not sign.” – Minor White Imagine Beetle Bailey’s surprise. As Aldous Huxley said, perhaps Earth is another planet’s Hell. And maybe on that other planet, gargantuan people sit down with their oil drum vats of coffee, butter their big-as-car bagels, and open their 12-foot Sunday newspapers to find human Earth lives splayed…
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Put your own mask on first

“I cannot live without my life!” –  Emily Brontë I fly a lot. And even so, it’s a lot less than I used to fly. Me and my Delta -Ultra -Flying -Too -Much -Not -Living -The -Life -on -the -Ground Super Platinum Card, that sad testament to life way too far above terra firma, see a lot of action in…
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Own your typhoon

“For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin – real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were…
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Mind the gap

“Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong. At that point you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those, a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live.” –Pema Chodron, In the Gap Between Right and Wrong…
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Close the boardroom closet

“Never confuse movement with action.” – Ernest Hemingway I don’t remember ever being this busy. Not even that time in the fourth grade when I was starring as Johnny Appleseed in our class play, learning to play the autoharp, and simultaneously creating my report on Missouri, the “Show Me” state, in a cardboard box panorama (I believe the Latin term…
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Study for the essay questions

“It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.” – Alec Bourne, A Doctor’s Creed Way back when I was learning my ABCs, names of state capitals, and the preamble to the U.S. Constitution at happy Hillcrest Elementary School way up there on the crest of that hill, We the People of These…
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