Quotes about Thanksgiving

Best wishes for a very Happy Thanksgiving! There is much to be grateful for--family, good friends, a roof over our heads, a job, and life itself. 

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There is one day that is ours. Thanksgiving Day is the one day that is purely American.  -- O. Henry

Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.  ---Marcel Proust

To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.    ---Victor Hugo

Be thankful for what you have; you'll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don't have, you will never, ever have enough. ---Oprah Winfrey

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others. --- Marcus Tullius Cicero

Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.  ---Ralph Waldo Emerson

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.  ---G.K. Chesterton

When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around. -- Willie Nelson

Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has plenty; not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some. -- Charles Dickens

I give thanks to my Creator for this wonderful life where each of us has the opportunity to learn lessons we could not fully comprehend by any other means. -- Joseph B. Wirthlin

God is glorified, not by our groans, but by our thanksgivings. -- Edwin Percy Whipple

What I've learned from cats

Back in the 1980s, I shared my life with two cats, a mother and daughter combo. Smoky was the mother’s name, and Mushy was her daughter. They were as different in personality as two cats could possibly be. Smoky was in a constant state of snit, whereas Mushy was in a constant state of happiness. Even when Smoky was a new mother, she seemed irritated by the constant need that her kittens had for her. Perhaps what annoyed Smoky was that her daughter was a much happier cat than she was. It’s hard to know. I loved them both and respected their different personalities. Both of them were affectionate in their own ways. Smoky’s affection was on her terms; she came to you when she needed some stroking or a hug, but didn’t always take kindly to being petted or fussed over if you wanted to give her some affection. Mushy was the complete opposite (hence her name); she was a people-pleaser and loved nothing more than to go from one guest to another for some affection and cuddling when I had family and friends visiting. Before I moved to Norway, my friend Cindy suggested I stay with her for a few months in order to save some money, which was a wonderful idea and one for which I am very grateful to her. However, it involved moving myself and my two cats into her home, something that Cindy’s cat Burgoo did not take very kindly to. He was used to ruling the roost and was very territorial about his house, especially the kitchen, which was of course the one room in the house where we all liked to congregate. My cats did not exactly know how to deal with him initially; he would pick fights with them (especially Smoky) no matter how much berth they gave him when they walked past him. Smoky especially did not like him, something he must have sensed very early on. Their fights escalated in intensity and ended with her being relegated to the cellar in order to prevent her being injured by him, since he was larger than both my cats and quite aggressive. I spent a lot of time in the cellar with her after that. With Smoky out of the way, Burgoo tolerated having Mushy around. He permitted her entrance into the kitchen, on his terms of course. And those terms translated into her becoming a completely subservient cat. She would slink past him, body hugging the ground, not looking at him. Her behavior signaled ‘harmless’; it also signaled to him that she would not and did not want to fight him, oppose him or take control of anything he ‘owned’. She was willing to let him rule the roost whereas Smoky was not. Smoky did not take kindly to any person or any other cat telling her what she should or should not do, and she was certainly not willing to become subservient in order to deal with the situation. Looking back on it now, I wish it could have been otherwise. I wish I had not put them through that stress, even though I found a good home for them afterward where they both were happy. Had I had wanted to take them with me to Norway, they would have spent over four months in quarantine before being allowed into the country (those were the rules at that time), something I did not want to put them through since they were already older cats.

I learned some things while watching and taking care of Smoky and Mushy when we lived in Cindy’s house. The first was that Mushy was none the worse for wear after her short stay in Burgoo’s house; she adapted to that situation and dealt with it in the best way she could. When she and her mother went to live in my friend Judy’s house, she adapted to that situation as well and became a beloved member of Judy’s family, which included a dog and two cats from before. Smoky also adapted in her own way, but stayed mostly to herself, as I might have expected. I’ve thought a lot about both of my cats since then, and about how they adapted to change, new situations, and potential threats. I have a bit of both Smoky and Mushy in me. I haven’t backed away from a fight if felt that I was threatened or if I found myself in an unfair situation; I have not had any problems stating my opinion or making my wishes known. I haven’t had major problems with change, although it does take me a while to adapt to new situations. And if change or unfair situations threaten me or those I care about, I am more likely to respond as Smoky did. But what if Mushy’s way is the better way? What if choosing not to fight gets you what you want? Mushy did not want to end up living in the cellar like Smoky; she wanted to make sure she could always be in my vicinity. So she gave Burgoo what he wanted in order to get what she wanted, which was me. She was smart. I don’t know how she figured that out, but she did. And she definitely understood that the cellar was not where she wanted to be; she avoided going down there when I went to visit with Smoky. Mushy wanted to be with me and with people generally; she cared more about that than about doing what she had to do to appease Burgoo. She appeased the aggressor. I have to wonder how she knew how to do that, and why Smoky could not learn that behavior. But we humans don’t always manage that either; some of us will fight forever against what threatens us and it can end up literally killing us (stress, heart attacks, poor health). Whereas some of us will try to appease those who want to keep us down or take us down, by giving in, letting it happen, dealing with it and moving on. I have a hard time with that. I have a hard time ‘giving in’ especially in situations where I know that being in opposition would be the more ethical and fair way to proceed, for example, in work situations where workplace leaders harass others unfairly because they sit in power positions. But let’s suppose that appeasement might get you what you want, e.g. to an organizational level where you could make a difference? Where you could fight for the rights of those you meant were treated unfairly? I suppose what I’m trying to say is that you’ve got to strategize; you’ve got to give in order to get in a world that is not fair from the get-go. Strange that I should be learning that now at this point in my life. But now the goals are clear and more important than trying to change unfair and unethical leaders into fair and ethical ones. I am not the person who is best suited to taking on that fight, and I’m not sure I ever was.  

Quotes about Forgotten

·        “Write what should not be forgotten.”
― Isabel Allende

·        “I left the library. Crossing the street, I was hit head-on by a brutal loneliness. I felt dark and hollow. Abandoned, unnoticed, forgotten, I stood on the sidewalk, a nothing, a gatherer of dust. People hurried past me. And everyone who walked by was happier than I. I felt the old envy. I would have given anything to be one of them.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

·        “When do you think people die? When they are shot through the heart by the bullet of a pistol? No. When they are ravaged by an incurable disease? No. When they drink a soup made from a poisonous mushroom!? No! It’s when… they are forgotten.
Dr. Hiriluk (One Piece)”  ― Eiichiro Oda

·        “She existed in her friends; there she was. All the parts of herself she'd forgotten. She knew herself best when she was with them.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

·        “And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart.
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?”
― W.H. Auden

·        “But that was New Orleans for you. The old didn’t die here. They were just forgotten.”
― Amanda Stevens, The Dollmaker

·        “No matter what happens, I don’t think that anyone will remember me when I disappear. It will be like I was never here. There will be no proof that I ever existed … you can’t be sad if you disappear, because disappeared people can’t feel sad. They can only be remembered or forgotten.”
― Matthew Green, Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend

·        “Be bold in life. Seize the moment. There is no surrender, no retreat. There is only conquer or be conquered, victory or defeat. Anything less is to be forgotten to history.”
― Jeffrey Fry

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Thinking about situations and times in life when people feel forgotten by others--old age, sickness, personal crises. All those times when people might feel completely alone, left on their own, pushed aside or slighted. I remember my mother saying that in old age, she felt invisible. Ignored and forgotten by the world. It hurt to hear her say that, because many older people I know have said the same thing to me. And most of them didn't and don't take kindly to being treated that way. But it happened all the same. So it's something to think about.......

Autumn moon photos

Bureaucracy and the film Brazil

I first saw the film Brazil in 1985 when it was released. It seems to have made a lasting impression on me, since I have remembered its basic message many years later. The message is that an out-of-control bureaucracy goes hand-in-hand with an Orwellian world, a dystopia, where the bureaucratic powers that be control the lives of society’s citizens. Parts of the film (a satire) are funny, but if you’ve lived a while and had anything at all to do with dysfunctional bureaucracies, you’ll understand that what you’re seeing on the screen is far from funny. A functionary named Sam Lowry, who is good at his low-level job but bored with his life, has recurrent dreams about rescuing a pretty blond girl and flying away with her to live a life of ‘happily ever after’. His mother, who is well-connected with all of the important bureaucrats, is trying to get him promoted, which he doesn’t want. She’s also trying to get him together with the daughter of a friend, something neither he nor the young woman wants. One of his assignments is to rectify a form error that resulted from a fly falling into a typewriter and causing the typewriter to type B instead of T when writing the name Tuttle, which has dire consequences for Archibald Buttle (a shoe cobbler with a family), not Archibald Tuttle (a terrorist and enemy of the state). This proves to be more difficult than he can imagine, and in this dystopian future, Archibald Buttle ends up dead. The bureaucracy that caused his death wants nothing more than to cover up this error and to forget it. Lowry ends up meeting Jill Layton, a neighbor of the Buttle family who reports this error (she is the woman from his dreams), and finds out that she is considered a terrorist because she insists on justice for Buttle’s family. When he decides to help her, he is also labeled a terrorist along with the woman he loves. Along the way, he ends up meeting terrorist Archibald Tuttle, a heating engineer who doesn’t play by the rules and who fixes Lowry’s heating system without the proper forms and authorized parts. This causes Lowry a number of problems with the bureaucracy that simply won’t accept that he has had unauthorized repair work done on his heating system, and his apartment is taken away from him. Those scenes are funny and sadly enough, true if you work in bureaucratic public sector workplaces and don’t play by their rules.

I’ve been thinking about this film lately, mostly because a large percentage of work time for many employees these days goes to appeasing the bureaucratic lions, tossing them bones and keeping them happy. It’s not an easy job, especially when the bureaucratic system is nothing but a dense jungle of incomprehensible rules and regulations that can choke the life out of most well-meaning employees. Case in point: you need an account number to order an instrument. You must talk to the accounting department that has its own rules and regulations concerning ordering and setting up an account number, but they haven’t talked to the order department that has its own rules and regulations concerning the same. Emails are sent back and forth, no one is on the same page, and weeks go by, even months. The accounting and ordering departments have the mistaken idea that all employees outside their departments actually understand accounting and ordering procedures and terminology. God help those employees if they make a mistake at any point along the way—if so, it’s ‘bless me father, for I have sinned’ against the great god of bureaucracy. If the system is insulted, it doesn’t take kindly to that. Atonement takes the form of listening to the functionaries’ lectures and demands of obedience to their rules, and generally being subservient to their wishes. I understand the need for bureaucracy in terms of keeping an organization ‘organized’ and running efficiently. I draw the line at having to toe their line, of having to jump when it tells you to jump. I draw the line when the system begins to feel like a totalitarian regime and when you actually become afraid to deal with it.   

The disappearance of Amy

I saw Gone Girl on Monday evening, and found it to be an absorbing thriller, one that is fast-paced and doesn't waste any time. The movie is much better than the book in my opinion. David Fincher, who directed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, did a great job of directing Gone Girl—it’s a taut thriller with a lot of unsettling things to say about personal relationships and about society’s addictive and obsessive relationship with television and the media. Ben Affleck finally found a role that suits him in Nick Dunne. His Nick is an interesting combination of clueless, indifferent, superficial, and opportunistic. He doesn’t invest more of himself than is absolutely necessary in any aspect of his life. In other words, Nick is no real prize—when he’s unemployed, he’s perfectly content to let his wife’s money pay for the bar he owns in Missouri after they’ve moved back there from New York, in order to be near his mother who has terminal cancer. He teaches part-time at a local college and ends up having an affair with one of his students, but even that seems half-hearted. He has promised his lover that he is going to divorce his wife, but seems to be immobilized by inertia or fear of telling her. Perhaps deep down, he knows that his wife is bonkers and he knows too that he doesn’t have the energy to fight her. But as the story progresses and he wakes up to the nightmare that his life has become, his anger starts to come out, and in the scenes where he is angry, he is truly believable. Stupid, unsuspecting Nick, who finally wakes up to the reality that he’s married to a psychopath, but by then it’s too late, she’s pregnant with his child and there’s no way he’s going to let her raise that child alone. So he ends up stuck in a loveless marriage, but he’s found himself and his purpose, so to speak. Up until that point, it seems as though he has mostly just drifted through his life.

Rosamund Pike did an impressive job as Amy Dunne. She’s a scary woman—Amy, not one you’d want to turn your back on for too long. ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’. And it would be nearly impossible not to scorn Amy. All men pay dearly for perceived slights and indiscretions in Amy’s world. Nick pays dearly for his infidelity, for his stupidity and insensitive treatment of Amy. She’s Amazing Amy for sure, but not in the way that her writer parents could ever have imagined. Amy is a monster--a beautiful one, but a monster nonetheless. One of the most manipulative women portrayed onscreen in a long time; I found myself thinking of Sharon Stone’s character Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct from 1992. If you wonder about what kind of marriage Catherine and Nick Curran (played by Michael Douglas) in Basic Instinct might have had, perhaps Amy and Nick’s marriage might be one version of such a marriage, at least at the point when it started to crumble.

Neil Patrick Harris did a great job as Desi Collings, Amy’s presumed stalker from her college years, manipulative in his own way, but no real match for Amy. He can’t see through her, or see that he’s being manipulated, and he pays with his life for his stupidity. Kim Dickens character, Detective Rhonda Boney, the cop assigned to the case of the missing Amy, is smart, tough, and demanding. It was a real pleasure to watch her in action, to watch her deal with her colleagues; she could definitely hold her own. The same was true for Nick's sister Margo, played by Carrie Coon--another good performance. 

The part of the story that dragged in the book, Amy’s experiences toward the end with Desi Collings, has been shortened and makes for a much more intense ending. The music score is appropriately jarring and creepy exactly at the times when it should be.

The film reminded me in parts of the film Presumed Innocent from 1990, with Harrison Ford and Bonnie Bedelia as husband and wife. He has an affair with a colleague who ends up raped and murdered, and he is accused of the crime. In reality, it is his wife who has murdered her to make her husband pay for his infidelity; the explanation for how it all happened was way out there, just like the ending in Gone Girl, and quite unusual for its time.

Gone Girl is an unsettling film in yet another way—one that’s often discussed these days. It depicts clearly the power of TV/media to make or break a person, a case, a cause, and the power that talk show hosts wield over the American public. It struck me that Gone Girl is a peculiarly American film; nowhere else in the world do talk show hosts have the type of power they have in America, at least as far as I know. They are the judge and jury, and if they like you, you’re saved, if not, you’re sunk. Innocent people, who don’t know how to play the manipulation game, will have their jugulars ripped out by these packs of dogs. This world is peopled with psychopaths, who manipulate the people and situations around them to serve themselves and their ratings. 

Press release for One Hundred Haikus for Modern Workplaces

And if you'd like to see the actual press release on PRWeb.com, here is the link: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/10/prweb12287136.htm#.VFZOyqUxgM0.email