The Natural Law of Attrition
August 31, 2008
I’m cheap and proud of it.
I use and re-use things carefully. It pains me in particular to waste food. The Buddhist/Catholic in me wants to find a way to airlift leftover rice and veggies to the Sudan.
I’m one of those obnoxious houseguests who will walk up behind you while you’re washing your dishes in your own damn sink and turn off the faucet.
Unfortunately cheap is a great word, like gay or liberal, that I can’t use anymore. I have to call myself a minimalist or a Voluntary Simplist and use words like frugal and responsible instead of stingy. I don’t hoard; I “re-purpose”. And I live in fear of being accused of not creating abundance. That’s worse than being accused of not having a sense of humor. It’s actually politically correct for me to be cheap. I just can’t say I am.
Top Ten Reasons to get out of bed in the morning
August 31, 2008
1. Bedsores. (A painful reminder that when you hang around in one place for too long it starts hurtin’).
2.You’re needed. (And you won’t know how or why unless you start the ball rolling).
3. You have much to offer. (No matter how bad things are. Some of us are gurus; some of us are cautionary tales. We all give in one way or another).
Everything I need to know in life I learned from my dog
August 31, 2008
I was mooching around the Self-Help section in my local Barnes and Noble the other day when I got to thinking about the first Self Help book I ever read. Most of the early ones were actually based on psychology and written by psychologists.
Remember “I’m OK. You’re Ok.”? It actually had pie-charts and you needed some intelligence to get through it.
I remembered, too, that during the rise of the Feminist movement in the Seventies the greatest of all self-help books were feminist books. Heady political stuff. These books actually changed the course of lives. How well I recall my first Consciousness Raising group. It was full of scary looking women in black Mao slippers carrying well-thumbed copies of Simone de Beauvoir’s “Second Self”.
