When I really worry about something, I don't just fool around. I even have to go to the bathroom when I worry about something. Only, I don't go. I'm too worried to go. I don't want to interrupt my worrying to go.
-- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 6
--
Perhaps Holden needed to read Carnegie!

Have a great Friday!

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
-- W.S. Merwin –

Absence sometimes makes the heart grow ANGRIER, I say!
I have so missed being able to blog, and to converse with my great blog-friends.
But I think I am back in business now!
The MAC is fixed!

Have a great Thursday!
**********

Wow! I’ve had the most relaxing weekend
Ever. While winter has been frosting the
Windows and filling the driveway, my
Friend and I have been lazing about
In the hot-tub talking, reminiscing
About so many things. Listening
To a lot of terrific music. Also
Just generally catching up
With each other. Eating
And laughing 2 much.
At one point, I even
Wrote a poem, &

The sun sank, and they both felt its final shudder of warmth.
Turning, he looked into her eyes.
“I feel as though you are the one I have waited for, all my life. And now you are here.”
“I’m not even sure if I believe in such a thing,” she whispered.

It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road.
-- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 1 –

Have a great Friday!

Yesterday I was a dog.
Today I'm a dog.
Tomorrow I'll probably still be a dog.
[Sigh!]
There's so little hope for advancement.
-- Snoopy –

Have a great Wednesday!

I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. And that in wondering bout the big things and asting bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, he say, the more I love.
And people start to love you back, I bet, I say.
They do, he say, surprise.

Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children's faces looking up

** NEWS FLASH **
Cipriano finally gets better job.
Opens his own Starbucks!

Have a great Thursday!
***********

She’s got a great sense of humour about herself. When she found out that the one group of potential voters who really hated her were white, middle-class men of property, she wondered, ‘What on Earth have I done to them.’ And then she worked it out. ‘Apparently,’ she said, ‘I remind them of their first wife.’
-- Gore Vidal, on Hillary Clinton –

Let Me Kiss Your Tongue

What happened next, I love.
No questions. You did not hesitate.
Someone may have had something to ask.
But, oh. Dearest.
In that certain darkness, my eyelashes playing horizon
Drinking, drank up the spectacle of that glistening muscle
Emerging from your full-wet lips,
On my sentence.
No clarification.

Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.
-- W.B. Yeats –

Have a great Thursday!

Interviewer: What do you do about writer's block?

The teacher, as has been recognized at least since Plato's Meno, is not primarily someone who knows instructing someone who does not know. He is rather someone who attempts to re-create the subject in the student's mind, and his strategy in doing this is first of all to get the student to recognize what he already potentially knows, which includes breaking up the powers of repression in his mind that keep him from knowing what he knows. That is why it is the teacher, rather than the student, who asks most of the questions.
-- Northrop Frye, in The Great Code –

Have a great Thursday!

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.
-- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, 1963 --

Have a great Thursday!

Chris Neil celebrates his game-winning goal, Nov.10, 2007.

In Grade 3, Neil’s principal asked him what he was going to be when he grew up. “I’m going to play in the NHL,” said Neil.

Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation…
-- Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Act 4, Scene 1 –

Have a great Monday!

A few steady earners can keep a publisher in business for years. If I were a publisher, I’d rather own J.R.R. Tolkien than J.R. Rowling.
-- Ursula K. LeGuin –

Have a great Thursday!

I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.
…The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.
-- Bertrand Russell, In Praise Of Idleness –

Well, here I am on the final leg of my holidays.
Still visiting. Still having fun. Still eating.
But come Monday, it is back to the coal mines for me. Tomorrow I will be boarding a plane and flying back home. Back to my meowing Jack, and the snowbanks I left behind in Ottawa.
At the end of each year I like to reflect upon the books I have read over the past 12 months. I reminisce about each one and see which come to the forefront as being especially memorable and worthwhile.

A University of Illinois student went to a bookstore & asked the saleswoman, "Where's the self-help section?"
She said if she told him, it would defeat the purpose.

Have a great Friday!

“It is like a firstborn son: you spend your life working for him, sacrificing everything for him, and at the moment of truth he does just as he pleases.”
--Dr. Urbino, on his wedding night, describing his penis to his young virgin wife Fermina, in Marquez’s Love In The Time of Cholera –
She continued to examine it, asking what this was for and what that was for, and when she felt satisfied with her information she hefted it in both hands to confirm that it did not weigh enough to bother with, and let it drop with a gesture of disdain.

Terrific book!
Have a great Thursday!

Two newlywed University of Illinois grads were driving through Louisiana.
As they were approaching the town of Natchitoches, they started arguing about the pronunciation of the name.

Praise and criticism seem to me to operate exactly on the same level. If you get a great review, it's really thrilling for about ten minutes. If you get a bad review, it's really crushing for ten minutes. Either way, you go on.
-- Ann Patchett –

Have a great Thursday!

Contemporary Elf Woes

Have a great Thursday!

Can someone, anyone out there, please tell me how it can already be the month of March?
No, seriously, though. In a matter of hours, it will be MARCH!
March?
What the hell happened to February?
Am I going senile? Did I sleep through January or something?
Even with the extra day here, the 29th, I’m sorry, but something seems mightily askew!
Why does it feel like I was just back home not so long ago, for Christmas?
Is this just a classic symptom of old age?
Is the rest of this year going to be just as fleeting?
According to Robert Frost… perhaps…. perhaps it is!

The sun was warm but the wind was chill,


Poems are hypothetical sites of speculation, not position papers. They do not exist on the same plane as actual life; they are not votes, they are not uttered from a podium or a pulpit, they are not essays. They are products of reverie.
-- Helen Vendler –

Have a great Thursday!

← “In a sense, this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know.”
-- Steve Martin, on Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life –

Have a great Monday!