Author Archives: Murphy

Spring is here

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Congress passed a bill that we shall have spring three weeks sooner.

Regardless of the equinoxes and solstices, spring begins with daylight savings.

I cannot say that I was pleased to hear that congress had changed the daylight savings time. Daylight savings has some inherent annoyances.

But now that it’s here, I’m glad.

My flowers are blooming. The yellow climbing roses, the irises, and even my star jasmine have begun to open andfragrate.

Mmmm….

And now, instead of waiting for the weekend to enjoy the fruits of my garden, I can see them in daylight on weekdays.

So, happy spring everyone. Take time to stop and smell the flowers.

The story of the people with holes like swiss cheese

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Once upon a time, there were born a people who had holes in their bodies, just like Swiss cheese.

The people did not know why they had these holes. They were inconvenient and even hurt. Different holes would ache at different times. Some of the holes were inconveniently placed, making it awkward and sometimes impossible to go about the business of their day.

Some people were ashamed of these holes, and covered them up entirely with clothing.

Some people decided they were proud of their holes, at least some of their holes anyway. They wore clothes that showed off their favorite holes. They still took great pain to hide the holes they did not like, even while flaunting the other holes.

Some of the people began to look around them, and found stones or pieces of wood to push into their holes. The stones filled in the holes, and they felt strange at first. But the people saw that they could fill in the holes and be better able to do whatever they needed done.

The other people, the ones who covered the holes entirely with clothes, were outraged. “How can you draw attention to your holes in this way? It’s shameless!”

The people who flaunted their favorite holes were outraged. “How can you deny who you are and the way you are made? You are stopping up your natural holes.”

The people with the filled in holes heard what the others said. But they could see that their lives were easier because they had filled in their holes, so they did not change.

He’s wonderful

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Me: Chris, it says in this magazine that the sun can get to you even when you are driving

Him: [Silence]

Me: Seriously, it says the sun can get to you through the windows, and you have to wear sunscreen of 30 SPF or higher. I have SPF 15, and I only put it on my face.

Him: [looks at me]

Me: I’m going to have to take showers in the stuff every day, or I will wrinkle up by the end of the year.

Him: You will be my little raisin

Me: What?

Him: My little white seedless raisin.

Me: [arms around his head] You’re wonderful

Him:…my pretty little raisin…

I should get a something for that

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This week at work I had a lot of places to go.

Monday I went to Corona
Tuesday I went to San Diego
Wednesday I went ot Long Beach
Thursday I went back to Corona
Friday I stayed home

Sounds a little bit like the litle piggy game.

Anticipating that I would be going so many places, and since i was on the longest drive of the week, I counted up how many miles I’ve travelled since I took my current job.

If I count up the commute time to get there and the driving I do once I am on the job, I’ve travelled 33 thousand miles in the last year and a half.

That’s a lot of miles.

I shoud get something for that….Like frequent flyer miles. I once took a trip to Europe for 35 thousand frequent flyer miles…

But maybe I am being a greedy american. Driving around doesn’t work like that. Why should I deserve free stuff for just going around and doing my job, the job that I am pretty fortunate to have?

People don’t give you stuff for nothing; businesses will give you free stuff because they get something out of it. Like in Vegas–they will give you a free dinner or a free hotel room, but only if you gamble and therefore lose money.

It all comes out with them ahead.

And so, the rich people, the ones with money to be milked, get the “free stuff.”

Suddenly, i realized that I _am_ a rich person.

I’ve seen emails where they ennumerate the way the majority of the world’s population lives. Things like water and clothing and medicine are all in scarce supply.

and at the end, they say “Everyone in America is in the top 5% of the richest people in the world.”

And it never feels real. Come on, it doesn’t. Yeah, I’ll read it. I can click the little X in the right corner of that email or webpage to make it disappear and then roll my office chair away from the corner desk in my cube to get up and fill my water bottle from the water cooler around the corner, next to the elevator.

and instead of feeling grateful for the easy life I have, I will be wondering if I can fine a cheap Nalgene water bottle on overstock.com to replace the less-than-optimal water bottle I currently use.

wow.

And when I am driving in my new GMC van with the V8 engine, airconditioning and CD player, I think about how I can get it to connect to my ipod, which it currently does not.

I am the wealthy. I am the very wealthy, along with all the rest of Americans. We are the ones who can be milked. That’s how the business world goes around.

It is still a long day, driving to San Diego and then getting up and driving to Long Beach the next day. It is a more pleasant feeling to be grateful for what I have than to be dissatisfied about what I do not have.

But that doesn’t mean that my ears don’t ring after 6 hours of hearing the engine roar, and my backside doesn’t get tired of sitting in the same position.

Resilience

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A few months ago, someone told me I was very resilient. His compliment rolled off my back, because I was concentrating on communicating something else altogether.

But it came back to me last week, as I was reading a book by Dr. Ruby Payne. I wanted to read A Framework for Understanding Poverty, but the only book my library had was a relationship book Crossing the Tracks for Love.

I roll my eyes. It is apparently much more important to read a relationship self-help book than to read a societal self-help book. Gawd, we’re so ego-centric!

But the book had many of the basic ideas. And that word came up again: Resilience. It means:
Rubber
bouncy
Bounce-back
get-back-on-that-horse-and-ride
Not taking no for an answer
stick-to-it-iveness
STUBBORN

I guess not everyone is like that. It seems like it would come in handy though. What good is it to lay down your tools and give up? Whoever got anywhere by sitting in their mud puddle and crying?

Of course, maybe some people don’t want to get anywhere. I do have respect for the quality of ‘enough’.

Enough stuff. Enough money. Enough food. Enough education.

It’s a balance though. Isn’t the world big enough to allow boundless pursuit of new things to have ‘enough’ of?

Dogfight

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My puppy was attacked by the neighbor dog yesterday.

Yes, I am NOT burying the lead on that one.

She is fine. I am still in shock though.

How scary scary. Nice dog comes up to us while I’m taking Lucy out for a walk. Then dog is attacking my perfect little puppy and she is shrieking. The neighbor wrestled with the dog to pull him off. He couldn’t.

I was standing there, watching him try to restrain his dog. But when he couldn’t, I jumped in and pulled her away. I held her while she was yelping uncontrollably, and kicked the dog away.

She kept shrieking–like nothing I’ve ever heard before–for a while. I had to hold her until she stopped, then I could feel her to make sure she wasn’t hurt.

No broken bones. No blood. She seems fine.

But I took a while to sleep last night, because I kept remembering her screams.

And I think “I should have jumped in sooner. I should have noticed the dog without a leash coming towards her. I should have protected her.”

Maybe I should have chewed out the nieghbor more, for letting his vicious dog out.

Maybe if I don’t he will really hurt her next time.

I shouldn’t let there be a next time!

I am going to have to learn to have quicker reflexes, I guess.

IMG_6721

I can’t let anything happen to her!

UPDATE:
The neighbor left a card in my mailbox, apologizing for the fight. I feel good about this. I think it indicates sincerity. If they know they messed up by not keeping their dog under control, they will probably work harder to keep him locked up.

I’m doing it again

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Lots and lots of thoughts are happening. I would like to stop and post, but before I do I zing off on another Japanese high-speed train of thought.

whew.

I get tired from all the thoughts quite often.

I’m gonna try, later today, to compose a post.

IMG_0986

What Spock taught me about eating Elephants

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I listed to one of my favorite podcasts yesterday:
FatFreeFilm

I used to work with Joel, and I really love the interviews he does on this series. This latest one features Leonard Nimoy.

SPOCK! I LOVE SPOCK!

So I was pretty excited to hear the show. It was great, and at the end, during the “film bites” segment, Spock (sorry, Leonard, you’ll always be Spock to me) had some advice.

Speaking of the overwhelming task of producing, funding, and generally making a film [I paraphrase]:

Think of an elephant. If you had to eat an elephant in one day, you couldn’t manage it. But if you took one bite out of the elephant every day, with time, you will finish the elephant.

That’s a very encouraging thought.

I just wish it didn’t seem like I had a herd of elephants.

Show Mercy to the Slender Grass

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Thanks to the WSJ again, I get to be amused.

It turns out that China has become embarrased about their bad translations. There are all sorts of signs and things with English translations that are…well…pretty funny.

Some are kind of incomprehensible, but some are nice. Their English for “Don’t Walk On the Grass” is “Show Mercy to the Slender Grass.”

They are not alone. I still giggle when I remember the sign the cleaning people put up after they’d shampood the carpets and they were still wet:
BE CAREFUL OF SLIP AND FALL

what first language resulted in that ESL sign? The cleaning people spoke spanish, but the sign was a printed form, so maybe they bought a bunch of them from asia at a discount. Hard to say.

We live in a complex world.

But China will be hosting the Olympics and have decided to clean up their language. There are language police going around and giving fix-it tickets to cities and restaurants, etc. for their bad english.

Of course there are fans of this sort of thing. Check this out:
www.chinglish.de