Friday, January 27, 2006
Good Readin...this is from a scrappy newsletter I belong to Scrapgirls.com anyway loved it & thought I would share here. Ro is an excellent writer.
Something to think about...Life Musings from Ro
"I find that the very things that I get criticized for, which is usually being different and just doing my own thing and just being original, is the very thing that's making me successful." - Shania Twain
Difference is that thing that causes us to squirm and celebrate. On one hand, we love the differences in celebrities that cause their talents to rise to the top of the heap. On the other hand, when we notice the same types of differences in other people around us, we often feel less because of their uniqueness and so the uncomfortable feelings we experience within ourselves causes us to behave in a manner that is less than who we truly are.
It seems not to matter whether we perceive the differences to be “better than” or “worse than” our own. They are different and try as we may (and no matter what good things we proclaim to the world), we charge about trying to homogenize everyone so that we might, at the very least, feel okay about ourselves.
The problem with this, of course, is that it is the differences in us that makes life interesting. And it is people who are able to view things from a unique angle that usually are able to change the world in a positive way.
Since I have a degree in music, I had to study the lives of the great composers in detail. Most of them had unusual lives and it was quite common for them to exist on the fringes of society, never quite fitting in. Some of them were even perceived by their associates as slightly whacky, partially because they were so in tune to the unique sounds that they were hearing that they simply had to bring to the world. It didn’t matter to them if they were poor, rich, popular, or not. They had something and they had to use it. Period. The majority of them died without any notoriety whatsoever because their peers never did “get” them or their music.
One of my first “real” jobs (meaning, a job that my father didn’t pay me to do) was as a typist. Every day I went into a big room that was lined with desks that were piled with stacks of uncompleted work and baskets to put the work that you managed to complete that day into. This work was taken away at night by some mysterious being. (I never saw it happen. It could have been an angel, for all I knew.) Correspondingly, each morning my uncompleted pile had grown larger. The only other item each of us had at our desks was an electric typewriter.
And so we sat and typed and typed and typed. We had to go fast. The work we did required that no errors appeared in the text and so if they occurred, we were to XXXXX over the mistake so that no one could mix up the typos with the correct information.
The whole thing felt impossible to me, as I am a person that can’t stand having a large amount of work left to do. And it was simply not possible to make a dent in the amount of outstanding work we had waiting for us.
The majority of my coworkers were single women in their early twenties. I was the lone married girl (just 20) and as such, I skirted the outside fringes of our society. They didn’t hate me, but they didn’t welcome me into their friendships either.
But then, one day, a new assistant supervisor was hired. She was a single woman that was in her mid-thirties and the other girls immediately hated her. The hated her with a passion that was extremely surprisingly to me.
Why? She was so new that she hadn’t had time to do anything offensive.
Things got so uncomfortable in that little typing world (which still reminds me somewhat of the Hell that Scrooge was shown in one of his dreams), that I quit and got another job where the work was more enjoyable.
I’ve thought about this situation off and on throughout the years, still wondering why this new woman was instantly hated by her staff. And then one day it hit me. I knew what it was all about.
You see, it wasn’t her, particularly, that they hated. It was what she was: an unmarried woman in her thirties.
All of this sounds ridiculous today, but back in the mid-70’s, the biggest fear that a young woman had was that she would become an “old maid.” (Yes, it is truly true. People did think that way.) And my co-workers were already scared to death that they were headed that direction.
They were young women, most of them without any significant education, and the majority of them had weight issues. They didn’t seem to have anything more interesting going on in their lives than those piles and piles of undone work. They were afraid that they were going to be doomed to that existence forever and that their shining white knights would never come along and rescue them from it.
And then this new supervisor comes in and proves to them - just by being there and by who she is - that they might be right. It scared them to death and they reacted by rejecting her vigorously.
So while it appeared on the surface that there was some difference in this woman that they hated, the truth was, it was her similarity to them that made them afraid that they would end up like her.
Differences are like that. It is often the differences in other people that frighten us because there is something too familiar in those differences and we react badly.
We are afraid that we won’t measure up.
We are afraid that we don’t measure up.
We are afraid that if we accept the person with the difference, we will be set aside by those people who are “in”. (Of course, the people that are “in” put themselves “in”. Why we care at all about who is “in” and who is “out” could be the subject of an entire week of muses, I believe.)
We are afraid that their differences are “catching” somehow. We know logically that this is impossible, but we don’t act rationally in these situations. (Although, most people would never admit that they misbehave in this manner.)
Perhaps, you have heard stories about what chickens do when they discover one in their flock has a weakness. The chickens are not charitable about the flaw. They don’t put the sick friend to bed and give them cow soup and crackers. They don’t put hot water bottles on their heads and sing them lullabies.
Nope. The chickens corner the “problem chicken” and literally peck it to death. It’s a gruesome site that only people who have flocks of chickens have witnessed.
This sounds horrifying doesn’t it? People would never do such a thing. Aren’t we lucky that we aren’t chickens?
But people do the same thing to each other every single day. When we find some difference in another person that worries us, instead of celebrating it, or tending it, or helping it along, we often put the person in a corner, isolate them, ignore them, talk about them, roll our eyes at them, laugh at them, or act as if they don’t exist at all.
We are politely pecking them to death.
It happens in the workplace. It happens at the mall. It happens at church. It happens at amusement parks.
It happens anyplace that people interact with each other.
However, we have been told by one who is wiser than all of us that we aren’t to act this way. We are told that we are to treat others as we would have them treat us. We are told that we are supposed to love each other as much as we love ourselves.
Ahhh….. Now we have arrived at the crux of the matter, I believe.
It is impossible to love someone as much as you love yourself, if you don’t love yourself at all.
So it’s a funny thing about differences. We theoretically celebrate them. We actually are afraid of them. But if we can just get a grip on ourselves and learn to love the glorious creatures that we were meant to be, all of it falls away and suddenly, we don’t mind one little bit if people are different than we are.
So today’s challenge is this: Look at yourself in the mirror. Make yourself look square into your eyes and say, “You are okay just the way you are. I wouldn’t change a thing.”
And mean it.
It’s a very real beginning.
Ro
"I find that the very things that I get criticized for, which is usually being different and just doing my own thing and just being original, is the very thing that's making me successful." - Shania Twain
Difference is that thing that causes us to squirm and celebrate. On one hand, we love the differences in celebrities that cause their talents to rise to the top of the heap. On the other hand, when we notice the same types of differences in other people around us, we often feel less because of their uniqueness and so the uncomfortable feelings we experience within ourselves causes us to behave in a manner that is less than who we truly are.
It seems not to matter whether we perceive the differences to be “better than” or “worse than” our own. They are different and try as we may (and no matter what good things we proclaim to the world), we charge about trying to homogenize everyone so that we might, at the very least, feel okay about ourselves.
The problem with this, of course, is that it is the differences in us that makes life interesting. And it is people who are able to view things from a unique angle that usually are able to change the world in a positive way.
Since I have a degree in music, I had to study the lives of the great composers in detail. Most of them had unusual lives and it was quite common for them to exist on the fringes of society, never quite fitting in. Some of them were even perceived by their associates as slightly whacky, partially because they were so in tune to the unique sounds that they were hearing that they simply had to bring to the world. It didn’t matter to them if they were poor, rich, popular, or not. They had something and they had to use it. Period. The majority of them died without any notoriety whatsoever because their peers never did “get” them or their music.
One of my first “real” jobs (meaning, a job that my father didn’t pay me to do) was as a typist. Every day I went into a big room that was lined with desks that were piled with stacks of uncompleted work and baskets to put the work that you managed to complete that day into. This work was taken away at night by some mysterious being. (I never saw it happen. It could have been an angel, for all I knew.) Correspondingly, each morning my uncompleted pile had grown larger. The only other item each of us had at our desks was an electric typewriter.
And so we sat and typed and typed and typed. We had to go fast. The work we did required that no errors appeared in the text and so if they occurred, we were to XXXXX over the mistake so that no one could mix up the typos with the correct information.
The whole thing felt impossible to me, as I am a person that can’t stand having a large amount of work left to do. And it was simply not possible to make a dent in the amount of outstanding work we had waiting for us.
The majority of my coworkers were single women in their early twenties. I was the lone married girl (just 20) and as such, I skirted the outside fringes of our society. They didn’t hate me, but they didn’t welcome me into their friendships either.
But then, one day, a new assistant supervisor was hired. She was a single woman that was in her mid-thirties and the other girls immediately hated her. The hated her with a passion that was extremely surprisingly to me.
Why? She was so new that she hadn’t had time to do anything offensive.
Things got so uncomfortable in that little typing world (which still reminds me somewhat of the Hell that Scrooge was shown in one of his dreams), that I quit and got another job where the work was more enjoyable.
I’ve thought about this situation off and on throughout the years, still wondering why this new woman was instantly hated by her staff. And then one day it hit me. I knew what it was all about.
You see, it wasn’t her, particularly, that they hated. It was what she was: an unmarried woman in her thirties.
All of this sounds ridiculous today, but back in the mid-70’s, the biggest fear that a young woman had was that she would become an “old maid.” (Yes, it is truly true. People did think that way.) And my co-workers were already scared to death that they were headed that direction.
They were young women, most of them without any significant education, and the majority of them had weight issues. They didn’t seem to have anything more interesting going on in their lives than those piles and piles of undone work. They were afraid that they were going to be doomed to that existence forever and that their shining white knights would never come along and rescue them from it.
And then this new supervisor comes in and proves to them - just by being there and by who she is - that they might be right. It scared them to death and they reacted by rejecting her vigorously.
So while it appeared on the surface that there was some difference in this woman that they hated, the truth was, it was her similarity to them that made them afraid that they would end up like her.
Differences are like that. It is often the differences in other people that frighten us because there is something too familiar in those differences and we react badly.
We are afraid that we won’t measure up.
We are afraid that we don’t measure up.
We are afraid that if we accept the person with the difference, we will be set aside by those people who are “in”. (Of course, the people that are “in” put themselves “in”. Why we care at all about who is “in” and who is “out” could be the subject of an entire week of muses, I believe.)
We are afraid that their differences are “catching” somehow. We know logically that this is impossible, but we don’t act rationally in these situations. (Although, most people would never admit that they misbehave in this manner.)
Perhaps, you have heard stories about what chickens do when they discover one in their flock has a weakness. The chickens are not charitable about the flaw. They don’t put the sick friend to bed and give them cow soup and crackers. They don’t put hot water bottles on their heads and sing them lullabies.
Nope. The chickens corner the “problem chicken” and literally peck it to death. It’s a gruesome site that only people who have flocks of chickens have witnessed.
This sounds horrifying doesn’t it? People would never do such a thing. Aren’t we lucky that we aren’t chickens?
But people do the same thing to each other every single day. When we find some difference in another person that worries us, instead of celebrating it, or tending it, or helping it along, we often put the person in a corner, isolate them, ignore them, talk about them, roll our eyes at them, laugh at them, or act as if they don’t exist at all.
We are politely pecking them to death.
It happens in the workplace. It happens at the mall. It happens at church. It happens at amusement parks.
It happens anyplace that people interact with each other.
However, we have been told by one who is wiser than all of us that we aren’t to act this way. We are told that we are to treat others as we would have them treat us. We are told that we are supposed to love each other as much as we love ourselves.
Ahhh….. Now we have arrived at the crux of the matter, I believe.
It is impossible to love someone as much as you love yourself, if you don’t love yourself at all.
So it’s a funny thing about differences. We theoretically celebrate them. We actually are afraid of them. But if we can just get a grip on ourselves and learn to love the glorious creatures that we were meant to be, all of it falls away and suddenly, we don’t mind one little bit if people are different than we are.
So today’s challenge is this: Look at yourself in the mirror. Make yourself look square into your eyes and say, “You are okay just the way you are. I wouldn’t change a thing.”
And mean it.
It’s a very real beginning.
Ro
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Oh man, how sad is this?
I cried. I couldn't help it, this made me so sad. Which is one reason I normally don't watch/read the news.
Fla. Highway Crash Kills 7 Adopted Kids
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060126/ap_on_re_us/school_bus_crash
Fla. Highway Crash Kills 7 Adopted Kids
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060126/ap_on_re_us/school_bus_crash
Sunday, January 22, 2006
| You are a Mild Mama |
 You don't have to be screaming at the top of your lungs to have a good time You rather chill, soak in the moment, and appreciate life for what it is Guys appreciate your "take life as it comes" approach... (Though they wouldn't mind if you got a little wild from time to time!) |
| You Are Sunshine |
 Soothing and calm You are often held up by others as the ideal But too much of you, and they'll get burned You are best known for: your warmth Your dominant state: connecting |
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Time to update my blog I guess. When I tried on Sunday, my computer froze and I lost everything I had typed. Needless to say, I was a wee peeved about that!
So, last Sat was my sister's bday. She lives in a smaller town 45 mins from me. So my Aunt & I went up there...met her and her friends & then we to an Eagles Club 20 mins from her, where our other Aunt & Uncle's Country Western band was playing. Of course I freakin forgot my camera!!! I am so mad at myself. I actually remembered to bring it to my sisters but I brought it in to her house with the intention of getting a group photo before we left for the bar. Yeah, that didn't happen either. So, the chances of having this particular group of people all together for something has never happened & probably will never happen again....and I Freakin forgot the camera! I guess you get my point, I'm very disappointed in me. But everyone had a fabulous, fabulous fun time!!! I'm glad we could all be there. Even tho it was 3:30 in the morning before I got home...UFF-Da! And almost 4:30 before I got to sleep, I was so tired. I'm used to staying up but not being out. And my hips hurt from dancing...I know, I really do sound old, don't I?!?!?!? lol...I was wearing heels & I've never worn heels dancing :D
So Sun. & Mon. were total down days. I'm glad Samantha didn't have any school on Monday. I'm thinkin this is a sign of getting old....when I need 2 days to recuperate from one nite out, in which I wasn't even drinkin! lol....crazy!
Tuesday was back to school & Samantha had dance and she didn't whine about going. That was nice. Weds after school, we met some friends for lunch at Planet Pizza....Samantha's fav place now. The kids had a good time playing. Last time we were there Samantha hit the jackpot on one of the machines & got like 500 tickets, she was sooo stoked! She was grabbing the sides of the machine & jumping up and down & screaming. It was cute, wish I had the camera :D
After that Becky & her kids came over for the afternoon. We did our Christmas gift exchange. (LOL!) But, it was a good visit & the kids had fun. Of course, they always start having the best time in the 10 mins right before they leave. I wonder if there's some wacky cosmic connection there?!?!?!
After they left, I decided it was time to take the Christmas Tree down, even tho we still have gifts for our other friends.
Tonight was Girl Scout open registration nite. I decided we would at least go & check it out, since Samantha has been wanting to join so badly. So we went & checked it out & when I asked Samantha what she thought, she said "I'm IN!" LOL! So, she's officially a Girl Scout Daisy! And I'm a Assistant Troop Leader! Oh lordy, I never done anything like this before. They actually said I could be a troop leader but I was unsure of that. So, I'll go with assistant for now. Who knows if Samantha will decide to stick with it after this year. But she was sooo excited. She got home & had to show daddy all her stuff. And then she was playing with her lil animals & they were "in" the Girl Scouts! It was sooo cute :)
Anywho, that's my update! TTFN!!
So, last Sat was my sister's bday. She lives in a smaller town 45 mins from me. So my Aunt & I went up there...met her and her friends & then we to an Eagles Club 20 mins from her, where our other Aunt & Uncle's Country Western band was playing. Of course I freakin forgot my camera!!! I am so mad at myself. I actually remembered to bring it to my sisters but I brought it in to her house with the intention of getting a group photo before we left for the bar. Yeah, that didn't happen either. So, the chances of having this particular group of people all together for something has never happened & probably will never happen again....and I Freakin forgot the camera! I guess you get my point, I'm very disappointed in me. But everyone had a fabulous, fabulous fun time!!! I'm glad we could all be there. Even tho it was 3:30 in the morning before I got home...UFF-Da! And almost 4:30 before I got to sleep, I was so tired. I'm used to staying up but not being out. And my hips hurt from dancing...I know, I really do sound old, don't I?!?!?!? lol...I was wearing heels & I've never worn heels dancing :D
So Sun. & Mon. were total down days. I'm glad Samantha didn't have any school on Monday. I'm thinkin this is a sign of getting old....when I need 2 days to recuperate from one nite out, in which I wasn't even drinkin! lol....crazy!
Tuesday was back to school & Samantha had dance and she didn't whine about going. That was nice. Weds after school, we met some friends for lunch at Planet Pizza....Samantha's fav place now. The kids had a good time playing. Last time we were there Samantha hit the jackpot on one of the machines & got like 500 tickets, she was sooo stoked! She was grabbing the sides of the machine & jumping up and down & screaming. It was cute, wish I had the camera :D
After that Becky & her kids came over for the afternoon. We did our Christmas gift exchange. (LOL!) But, it was a good visit & the kids had fun. Of course, they always start having the best time in the 10 mins right before they leave. I wonder if there's some wacky cosmic connection there?!?!?!
After they left, I decided it was time to take the Christmas Tree down, even tho we still have gifts for our other friends.
Tonight was Girl Scout open registration nite. I decided we would at least go & check it out, since Samantha has been wanting to join so badly. So we went & checked it out & when I asked Samantha what she thought, she said "I'm IN!" LOL! So, she's officially a Girl Scout Daisy! And I'm a Assistant Troop Leader! Oh lordy, I never done anything like this before. They actually said I could be a troop leader but I was unsure of that. So, I'll go with assistant for now. Who knows if Samantha will decide to stick with it after this year. But she was sooo excited. She got home & had to show daddy all her stuff. And then she was playing with her lil animals & they were "in" the Girl Scouts! It was sooo cute :)
Anywho, that's my update! TTFN!!
Monday, January 16, 2006
Tidbit of INFO
Paraskevidekatriaphobia - Fear of Friday the 13th. (besides wishing I knew
how to pronounce this word, I would like to know who and how they came up
with such a word to describe this phobia)
It is estimated that 21 million Americans suffer with this. Even those who
say they don't put much stock in superstition, when asked, said they would
not plan their wedding on a Friday the 13th, start a new job, or close on a
house on that day.
how to pronounce this word, I would like to know who and how they came up
with such a word to describe this phobia)
It is estimated that 21 million Americans suffer with this. Even those who
say they don't put much stock in superstition, when asked, said they would
not plan their wedding on a Friday the 13th, start a new job, or close on a
house on that day.
Saturday, January 14, 2006
Happy Happy Birthday Day BilliJo!!! That's my lil sis is 30 TODAY :)
My sister has a smiley young girl holding our baby cousin
Auntie B & Samantha
My sis & me at my Bridal Shower
