3 Ring Binder

It is an internal conflict as old as romance itself: a fascinating woman walks into your life on the arm of a friend.  The more you get to know the woman, the more you think about her – and him – and how she looks at him; you become jealous.  Because you are friends with the man, you try to normalize your feelings for the woman and act as if nothing has changed between you. You evade your feelings for her until her adulation and hardly hidden passion for your friend breaks through your façade. Hurt, you rationalize your own ardor away, helped by her strong indications that your feelings are unrequited. Then you begin to question your own lovability? Didn't you do everything right? Aren't you every bit as desirable as your friend? Why doesn't she love you? What is the answer to this seemingly unanswerable problem? It's simple, really.  You write a pop song. You use an obscure word in one of the verses. Your conflict becomes immortalized and screamed by ...

A ball bouncing game from my youth instructed the player to throw the ball up ( plainsies ), throw it up and clap ( clapsies ) throw it up and roll your hands ( roll the ball ) and touch your shoulders ( tabapsies ). In trying to locate the rest of the ball bouncing chant, I found out not only is my “tabapsies” a mondegreen , but also the motion – touching your shoulders – isn’t even the correct movement! You are supposed to clap your hands behind your back and say “ to backsies .”  Yeah. That makes much more sense. Being only slightly deflated by this discovery, I will still share my exciting news.  In an attempt to counteract the stretching of my wrist from doing front squats two days in a row, I pulled out the tabapsies motion this morning.  This, in itself, is not newsworthy.  However, I grabbed both shoulders with all five fingers!!! Again, not exciting unless you know that when I was nine years-old, I broke my left elbow doing a running c...

I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom. And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between  economy and liberty , or  profusion and servitude . If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers. Our landholders, too, ...

The turtle shirt belongs to my daughter, it’s true Wearing it, I’m told, is not what I should do. “It gives children a fright When your face they then sight, Expecting a kid but instead, seeing you.” I was just happy it was clean and it fit.

The Choice by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work, And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark. When all that story's finished, what's the news? In luck or out the toil has left its mark: That old perplexity an empty purse, Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.  I found the first four lines of this poem as the section marker of a book I am currently reading and wanted to know more. While I relish the clever and succinct use of rich words, I don't find truth in Yeats' inherent choice between life and work.  Isn't work the action of living? 

We've owned our car for two years and just found out that it has an Automatic Sound Levelizer.  Apparently the adults who drive the car suffer from an acute lack of curiosity that the newly-promoted-from-back-seat-to-front-seat child does not.  That’s kind of sad, really, but the discovery has added a bit of auditory thrill to our acceleration/deceleration cycles.  Okay, maybe that's kind of sad, too.  In other news, our car also has intermittent windshield wipers and automatic windows, both of which we recognized right away. 

by Rudyard Kipling, 1935 The careful text-books measure     (Let all who build beware!) The load, the shock, the pressure     Material can bear. So, when the buckled girder     Lets down the grinding span, The blame of loss, or murder,     Is laid upon the man.          Not of the Stuff - the Man! But, in our daily dealing     With stone and steel, we find The Gods have no such feeling     Of justice toward mankind. To no set guage they make us, -     For no laid course prepare - And presently o'ertake us     With loads we cannot bear:          Too merciless to bear. The prudent text-books give it     In tables at the end - The stress that shears a rivet     Or makes a tie-bar bend - What traffic wrecks macadam -     ...

Happily, at my last physical I found out I was fine. I was kind of surprised that I was fine because when I arrived at the doctor’s office, I was assaulted with some new paperwork to fill out. I say assaulted because, I am told quickly and gleefully, that this paperwork must be filled out and returned, so that the secretary may then put me in the queue to be seen by the health care professional whose services I have contracted near the time I have scheduled that service. I thought my blood pressure would be quite high.  So what was this new paperwork? HIPAA forms letting me know of my doctor’s intent to share my medical information with other medical and non-medical providers so I can get the best treatment, but really to "simplify" the administration of health records? Nope. I had gotten used to that CYA bit of white tape. Was it for insurance information to prove that I had the ability to pay the doctor for his services or had contracted with another agency that assumed...

"Ultimately, I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress,"    " And I'd just remind conservative commentators that, for years, what we have heard is, the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism, or a lack of judicial restraint,  that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law. "   - President Obama I'm glad to know that the Attorney General of the United States seems to have heard of Marbury v. Madison .  I find it slightly disingenuous that he herein extols the virtues of each branch of government having to uphold the same Constitution when his response was prompted by the Commander in Chief publicly chiding the judicial branch  (above) and when members of the U.S. Legislature scoff at having to determine whether or not their proposed laws fall withi...