When we befriend an animal, we always get more than we bargained for. Today The Feline Four and I are celebrating Week #83 of Barney still living well (albeit a bit breathless at times) with feline chylothorax as I wrote about in January 2011.
I am reminded once again of a bumper sticker on a local car: "Who rescued whom?" with a little paw print on it.
As Timothy Braun reminds us, "Four-Legged Reason to Keep It Together," love comes in many shapes and sizes.
Q: Where can one get help if you are terminally ill and yet want a wedding?
A: Wish Upon a Wedding.
Recently I read another blog post suggesting that the blogger write not about what interests them but what people want: what will make them feel good or give them results. You know, the old "What's in it for me?" angle.
Here's a story that might give you both.
Girl meets boy but boy is her employee. Girl finds out boy is also interested in her. Boy and girl decide to meet for an Italian dinner. Boy agrees to quit his job. Relationship develops. Boy proposes to girl and she accepts. Boy gets sick and is diagnosed with cancer. The wedding will not be stopped.
However, with all their money invested in medical bills how do you have a wedding? Wish Upon a Wedding is a national nonprofit organization that helps couples facing terminal diseases pay for a wedding.
Click here to read the story of Angela Sclafani and Michael Olexa, see photos of their wedding and learn how Wish Upon a Wedding works.
Sometimes you get a hand in realizing "happily ever after."
A friend recently returned from a trip to Paris. We met at a local cafe for breakfast quiche and lattes so I could see her photos and hear her stories.
After the wonderfully exclusive armchair tour de france, our conversation turned to work. She has seen her hours as a storyteller get cut as school programs have turned away from music, literature, arts and the like. There is no money to fund the extras.
Litigation consulting is no different, I said. Fewer cases are going to trial because they are so costly; lawyers are turning away clients because of new laws on what fees and bills they can collect; lawyers tiring of the rigors of the litigation trail are themselves consulting on cases with colleagues, and the like.
Where's the hope? She reminded me of the prayer: give us THIS day our DAILY bread. While we would love to have the security of weekly or annual bread, it doesn't work like that.
A father who lost his daughter to a drunk driver - the first daughter in the family to graduate high school with honors and go to college - mourned that higher education is no protection.
I continue to revisit the Steve Jobs story: money is no protection from death.
And so it goes.
Why deoderant? I use a form of deodorant that dispenses the product in a dose with a few turns of a little wheel. It's what I need for the day. The toothpaste on the brush is what I need for the day. The water in the bottle, the electricity that fuels my computer, the phone service that allows me to share a call with a sister. It's just enough.
Do I want more? You bet I do. And in the wanting is a humble thanksgiving that my needs are met with assets and resources moment-by-moment.
I am reminded that you can go to a brightly lit theater and not return home. You can date a girl and never know that you will save her life. You can lose a 6 year old daughter on the operating room table.
May we be free from suffering and the root of all suffering - and give us this day our daily deodorant. Thank you.
I was going through a cardboard box the other day. It's one of many on the top shelf of a closet in my home. It holds written notes and letters that date back 40 years. Opening envelopes, visiting places and people, and reading long departed handwriting is more than a comfort. The written word sets a moment in time. I am reminded of who I was when, what I thought was important, who colored my life, and so on.
On February 20 2011, my friend and colleague Stephanie West Allen blogged about the importance of letter writing: Notes and letters - Long may they live!
She followed up that post with another on April 11, 2011, Writing Letters to the Future.
Ours are not frivolous gestures. Or a nod to a quaint notion. I wonder who will recall us, say 150 years from now just as we are able to recall the lives of those who lived life during the Civil War.
Life During Wartime recounts the efforts of
"A team at U.Va.'s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library has been posting on "150 Years Ago Today," an online blog started in 2009 that features transcribed Civil War letters and diaries. Now that the nation is in the midst of the Civil War sesquicentennial, which runs until 2015, there's renewed interest in the bloody conflict. And reading the words of the participants themselves provides a new, more intimate level of understanding.
Accessible from the Special Collections home page and fully searchable by name or date, the blog features correspondence by such Confederate notables as Robert E. Lee and Gen. Elisha F. "Bull" Paxton, who briefly commanded the Stonewall Brigade. But it also includes the words of the everyday people who shouldered muskets on the battlefield, suffered deprivations on the homefront and struggled to grasp the equality promised them in the Declaration of Independence. By posting these primary source documents online, the Special Collections Library is presenting the war's daily triumphs and tragedies to the world.
This enormous project started fairly simply. "Twelve years ago, Mary Roy Edwards volunteered to start transcribing our Civil War letters and diaries," says Ann Southwell (Grad '73), a Special Collections' manuscript cataloger who heads the effort. "After a while we decided we should put them up on a blog. Then we got the idea that we could do the entire war day by day." Edwards, the wife of former U.Va. architecture professor Charles R. Edwards, eventually transliterated more than 3,000 pages from the items at Special Collections. Another volunteer, John P. Mann IV, has been diligently working on letters written by Col. Edward T. Warren of the 10th Virginia Infantry. Southwell herself works on the project every evening after work."
As you are drawn into the entries that recount the lives of those who lived life during wartime, one thing is striking: not much has changed when we go to war. What matters most is still faith, family, friends, and the girls we left behind.
My hope is that as more of us read about the terrors and losses of war, we may shed some of our "rock logic' that makes Us right and Them wrong. Perhaps we can adopt a more fluid frame of mind that allows for more commonality, understanding and grace under fire.
The article reports on the interest generated in other countries:
"Nonetheless, the blog is attracting attention—it's received more than 20,000 hits as of early May. "We're getting a lot of hits from people in Russia, Ukraine and India," says Southwell. "I hope they're not using these letters to learn English!""
I hope we and they are using the letters to learn peace in our time.
Q: Why should lawyers care about the institution of marriage?
A: As the institution itself seems to declining, the legal definition of marriage is up for grabs.
As reported by Aja Gabel in the current issue of The University of Virginia magazine, The Marriage Crisis, marriage has declined over the past 50 years and continues to decline. Excerpt.
"Only about half of Americans are married now, down from 72 percent in 1960, according to census data. The age at which one first gets married has risen by six years since 1960, and now only 20 percent of Americans get married before the age of 30. The number of new marriages each year is declining at a slow but steady rate. Put simply, if you are an unmarried adult today, you face a lower chance of ever getting married, a longer wait and higher divorce rates if you do get married. The Pew Research Center recently found that about 40 percent of unmarried adults believe that marriage is becoming obsolete.
While marriage is in decline, unmarried cohabitation is on the rise. Fifteen times the number of couples today live together outside of marriage than in 1960. Almost half of cohabiting households include children.
Why should we care about what may be a failing institution? Brad Wilcox, U.Va. sociology professor and director of the National Marriage Project, argues that the institution of marriage still symbolizes core values important to intimate relationships.
“Marriage conveys a sense of meaning, purpose, direction and stability that tends to benefit adults and especially children. People who get married have an expectation of sexual fidelity, and that fidelity tends to engender a sense of trust and security,” Wilcox says. “There is no kind of similar solemn ritual marking the beginning of cohabitation.”
Allison Pugh, also a U.Va. sociology professor, has a slightly different take on it. She says that it isn’t so much the institution of marriage that is important, but rather how well a family cares for children, regardless of its structure. Children need stability, nurturing and love, but both married and unmarried parents can provide those things, Pugh says.
Is America having a “marriage crisis?” Certainly, the institution of marriage is changing and it’s worth taking a look at why and where it might end up. It’s a question that a number of researchers at U.Va. are trying to answer by exploring the role of women in the workforce, emotional expectations for partnership and marriage’s benefits or costs to individuals and families."
In an nutshell, what has changed? Women became "liberated." We obtained college educations and entered the workforce. While discrepances in equal pay and opportunity continue to exist, women have more choices available to them while society seems ready, albeit resigned, to let us have them. Personal fulfillment is a goal rather than a tantalizing dream. Divorce is more acceptable than shameful. Birth control translatesinto higher economic brackets for both partners as women take control of their fertility and their earnings.
Ultimately, marriage in America has changed because Americans have changed:
"Marriage has changed because America has changed. We can’t return to the model of marriage from the mid-20th century because we no longer live in the culture or the economy that created it. And some would argue that we wouldn’t want to return to it even if we could. Both men and women have greater choice than they did 50 years ago not only in regard to whom they marry, but also if they do and what kind of family they want to build. And, if the experts agree on one thing, it is that these choices are some of the most important we make for our own happiness."
Click here to read more about the changing legal definition of marriage.
Which brings me to where things stand with the Prop (H)8 Trial. No one was more surprised than I to learn that the good - albeit sometimes whacko - folks in my adopted state of California swigged, chugged and guzzled the Kool-aid before adopting Prop(H)8 banning same-sex marriage. Surely, we are at least as liberal as Vermont, as smart as New York, as socially savvy as Massachusetts. But no.
Do you want to know where things stand with the Prop 8 trial? Click here to read an exceptionally nuanced 5-part series exploring the future of Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the Prop 8 trial and marriage equality.
What is particularly broad-minded about the series is the author's willingness to step beyond the two cases (DOMA and Prop 8) to reflect upon the more global topic of the future of marriage equality in the United States. Excerpt.
"A vision of the future of marriage equality in the United States
Yesterday, I argued that the DOMA case should be decided before Prop 8 because it fundamentally changes the arguments to be made against California’s marriage ban, and other bans like it across the nation. Today, I want to take that a step farther and look past the two cases to the future of marriage equality in general.
Marriage equality currently stands at a tipping point in the United States, will polling beginning to shift to the majority in our favor, DOMA and Prop 8 at play before the Supreme Court, and marriage referenda in three states in November. While the legislative and judicial tracks are currently moving in parallel and do effect each other, I believe that the legislative track will eventually (and within the next few years) be exhausted, and further victories will have to come through the courts. A Supreme Court ruling on DOMA this year, rather than Prop 8, puts the marriage movement on more solid footing for the future."
Folks, the times they are a changin.
What was it that Aaron Sorkin said in his commencement address to the graduates of Syracuse University?
MR. SORKIN “You’re too good for schadenfreude, you’re too good for gossip and snark, you’re too good for intolerance — and since you’re walking into the middle of a presidential election, it’s worth mentioning that you’re too good to think people who disagree with you are your enemy.”
Q: What's the rush?
A: Fill in the answer yourself.
Last week I was in New Orleans. For the year prior I had been working as co-chair of the American Society of Trial Consulants' Annual Conference. The conference was a huge success: more attendance than seen in the past four years, excellent content, and a whole lotta fun that folks can have only in New Orleans. But I was busy.
What's the rush?
There were board matters (I am an active member of the board of directors) to attend to, a long and tedious board meeting, speaking on a panel as a stand-in for a member who could not make it, meeting with trial consultant wannabees, making sure things were running well and smoothly, visiting with vendors, huddling with board members and attendees on other organizational issues, and the work that continues long distance while one is away.
What's the rush?
Coming home I was confronted by an article in the NYTimes reporting on high schoolers inhaling Adderall to get the academic edge that would assure them a college seat: Risky Rise of the Good Grade Pill. Excerpt.
The drug was not cocaine or heroin, but Adderall, an amphetamine prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder that the boy said he and his friends routinely shared to study late into the night, focus during tests and ultimately get the grades worthy of their prestigious high school in an affluent suburb of New York City. The drug did more than just jolt them awake for the 8 a.m. SAT; it gave them a tunnel focus tailor-made for the marathon of tests long known to make or break college applications.
“Everyone in school either has a prescription or has a friend who does,” the boy said.
At high schools across the United States, pressure over grades and competition for college admissions are encouraging students to abuse prescription stimulants, according to interviews with students, parents and doctors. Pills that have been a staple in some college and graduate school circles are going from rare to routine in many academically competitive high schools, where teenagers say they get them from friends, buy them from student dealers or fake symptoms to their parents and doctors to get prescriptions."
What's the rush?
What I'm even more concerned about is what happens when these young people get to college. What will keep them amped up to get good grades then? And what happens after graduation?
What's the rush?
A fellow alum from the University of Virginia raised this same question in an article published in the Summer 2012 issue of The University of Virginia magazine, "What's the Rush?" A mother talking to her 6-month old daughter addresses the personal toll the pressure for success raise when we push the pace of life. Excerpt.
"Seven years ago, when I was 25, I had a mini breakdown over my lack of accomplishments. I had just completed my master’s program and—gasp—had not written the book I was supposed to write. I had no city to call a home, did not own a house and could not have been more lost or confused. Later I discovered this was so common with my generation, that it was dubbed the “quarterlife crisis.”
The Internet has made it so easy to announce and seemingly measure success that our expectations of how fast we should achieve our goals have become severely skewed.
At the time of my “breakdown” I was living in London working for the U.N. Having this full-fledged panic attack about being a loser in life, I had no idea how many of my peers were having the same doubts.
Our desire for speed has distorted our concept of how fast our life should be moving. If we expect to save the world by the time we are 26, what do we expect of ourselves at 50?
What is even scarier is that many of my peers are actually doing it. Recently I was chatting with my college buddy Bilal Qureshi (Col ’04), who went to U.Va. and Columbia’s school of journalism before becoming a producer at NPR, all by the time he hit 25. We were talking about a friend whose ambitions had caused her to collapse. Her body had literally given up, and she was undergoing tests to find out what was wrong.
It made me think, What is the rush? What are we rushing for? What are we rushing toward?"
At the ASTC Annual Conference I sat in on a program about blogging and social media marketing. I was reminded AGAIN! to make my content relevant, useful, substantive. There was no mention of beauty, inspiration, joy, prosperity, life-affirming work, community, and the like.
What's the rush?
As the wise ones say, "Days are long but years are short."
No matter who we are or where we are; no matter our race or creed or gender; no matter our skin color or language - we all laugh the same.
We just don't do it often enough. Maybe we forget.
The older I get I find there is plenty to laugh about. As a former nurse I can tell you with certainty that laughter is the best medicine.
Art Linkletter thought so, too. Time out of mind Linkletter worked in a TV station playroom asking children questions and listening for their responses. As you'll see, what made it all work so well was how Linkletter made the kids feel: as if someone was really listening to them.
Here are a few that might bring a smile to your face:
Kids Sat The Darnedest Things1
Kids Say The Darnedest Things2
Kids Say The Darnedest Things3
If kids are not your thing, perhaps The Laughing Buddha might be.
Or, if you prefer puppies, have I got the farm for you. Juniper Moon Farm and Day #1 of their three-week old Maremma puppies on Day #1 eating solid food. Kinda reminds me of growing up with 6 siblings.
TIP: Laugh well and often. It certainly makes folks wonder what you're up to.
Time out of mind I took every class offered by The Arthur Murray Dance Studios. I competed in ballroom dance. My favorites were the cha-cha, Samba and the waltz. I had a pair of silvery regulation dance shoes with the kidskin soles that were carried in a bag and used only on the dance floor.
As the story goes, my mother named me after her college roommate, Diane Blue, a woman who dreamed of becoming a professional dancer. Instead, like many women of her time, she married; and gave up dancing. I should have paid attention. I married a fellow with no sense of rhythm and two left feet - and then my used-to-be-husband danced away.
Still, I'm a dancer at heart. I shake what my mama gave me at Zumba classes. I love watching dance movies. And Fred Astaire.
Imagine my delight to learn that 9 years ago The New England Journal of Medicine proclaimed dancing as the exercise associated with reducing your risk of dementia and making you smarter.
In a nutshell, here's how Dancing Makes You Smarter:
"We immediately ask two questions:
Why is dancing better than other activities for improving mental capabilities? Does this mean all kinds of dancing, or is one kind of dancing better than another?
That's where this particular study falls short. It doesn't answer these questions as a stand-alone study. Fortunately, it isn't a stand-alone study. It's one of many studies, over decades, which have shown that we increase our mental capacity by exercising our cognitive processes. Intelligence: Use it or lose it. And it's the other studies which fill in the gaps in this one. Looking at all of these studies together lets us understand the bigger picture.
Some of this is discussed here (the page you may have just came from) which looks at intelligence in dancing. The essence of intelligence is making decisions. And the concluding advice, when it comes to improving your mental acuity, is to involve yourself in activities which require split-second rapid-fire decision making, as opposed to rote memory (retracing the same well-worn paths), or just working on your physical style.
One way to do that is to learn something new. Not just dancing, but anything new. Don't worry about the probability that you'll never use it in the future. Take a class to challenge your mind. It will stimulate the connectivity of your brain by generating the need for new pathways. Difficult and even frustrating classes are better for you, as they will create a greater need for new neural pathways.
Then take a dance class, which can be even better. Dancing integrates several brain functions at once, increasing your connectivity. Dancing simultaneously involves kinesthetic, rational, musical and emotional processes."
TIP: No matter how or when or with whom, your style or your size, dance!
Story-gatherer & wizard of words reflects on stories we tell to relate, understand & persuade each other. Share your stories.
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