Loose Leaf Notes

1. A lot of people over the weekend were leaving my house with a brown paper bag.  See why HERE.

2. At our Thanksgiving gratitude circle of about 15 people our host suggested everyone shut off their cell phones for an hour. Curious, I asked the group how many didn’t have a cell phone.  I was the only one.

3. Recent Occupy Wall Street Sign: Black Friday. Because in America, you can pitch a tent for capitalism, but not democracy.

4. Much Ado About Stuffing:  On a recent Jon Stewart segment about the far right being upset that Obama left God out of his Thanksgiving address (even though he actually  hadn’t left God out), Jon reminded his viewers about the true roots of Thanksgiving: “a bunch of pagans teaching religious zealots how to farm.”

5. I think the press should start reporting when murderers and people who commit suicide are on anti-depressants when they commit their acts in the same way they comment on whether fatal car crash victims were wearing seatbelts or not.

6. Picasso had a blue period / casting all his subjects in its mood / singers sing the blues / not to wallow in melodrama / but because they want / to tell the truth … Read the rest of the poem HERE.

7. Are the “end of the internet” scares like the ones I keep getting in emails like the “end of the world” scares that have gone on since time immemorial?

8. After hearing from friends about the African glass eater who recently performed in Floyd, I was sure it was a trick until I did some research on the internet and found out that some people actually do eat glass by avoiding soft tissue in the mouth while they chew it down to sand.  I also discovered that some glass eaters get addicted to eating glass.

9. “If you tell the truth at all times, you will have clear relationships with everyone.  If you do not, things will get out of control very quickly. To get back into the flow of harmony, all your have to do is look to see where you stopped telling the truth to yourself or someone else, and fix it by telling the truth. Most of us arrive at our adult relationships with a backlog of ancient hurts, fears, and angers. The source of these wounds has often has been forgotten, so that it looks like our current relationships are causing us to hurt. In fact, our current relationships are the area in which we have the opportunity to clear up the free ourselves of these patterns from the past.”  ~ Read somewhere online during my research on co-dependency

10. “Withdrawal and projection are the natural outcomes of withholding. When you withhold, you keep inside yourself things that should be expressed. The very act of hiding these things takes you one step back from the relationship. A result of this withdrawal is that you will begin to project. In other words, you will begin to attribute to other people things that are actually issues of your own.”

11. Driving home from Roanoke last night I saw a lit-up sign that read “24 Hour MACY.”  I thought it was odd because I didn’t know we had a Macy’s in the area and because the store was small and dark with no advertising out front, and then I got closer and noticed that lights for the letters PHAR had burned out.

12. I also saw the worst bumper sticker ever on a truck. It was a picture a Confederate flag next to the words “Nuke the North.”

13. “Why is it easier to believe that 150,000,000 Americans are being lazy rather than 400 Americans are being greedy?”  ~ Another OWS sign

~ Thirteen  Thursday hub HERE.