Loose Leaf Notes

1. Some universities are redesigning their courses and requiring that assignments be handwritten rather than typed due to the prevalence and use of AI to get around assignments, according to the NYT.

2. Posted on Facebook by my friend Michael: Tantra is like squeezing a tube of toothpaste. Comment reply:  Karma is trying to put it back in.

3. THIS heartwarming Netflix documentary, Older Than Ireland, interviews a number of Irish centenarians, who discuss their lives and what they’ve learned from 100+ years of history. Watch the whole show HERE.

4. “I feel the very same. I don’t see any change to when I grew up or any age, except I’m more comfortable now not doing anything.” Mary Kilroy, age 101

5. “One has entered the Middle Passage when the demands of the true self press restive and uprising against the acquired persona, eventually colliding to produce untenable psychic ache — a “fearsome clash,” Jungian psychologist James Hollis writes, leaving one “radically stunned into consciousness.” The summons often begins with a call to humility — having failed to bend the universe to our will the way the young imagine they can, we come to recognize our limitations, to confront our disenchantment, to reckon with the collapse of projections and the crushing of hopes. But this reckoning, when conducted with candor and self-compassion, can reward with “the restoration of the person to a humble but dignified relationship to the universe.” This, Hollis argues, requires shedding the acquired personality of what he terms “first adulthood…” Excerpted from The Marginalian

6. All I Can Say is I’d Love You Either Way. Mad for Iguanas HERE.

7.My blog is green for a reason. More HERE.

8. Artemis Journal founder/editor took this photo of me reading Barbie’s Retirement at the recent Arts Pop at Taubman Museum.

9. And now she’s 64 / and is writing her memoir / She dyes her hair / while the eyes of the world / quietly avoid her / She left her dream house estate / to the Goodwill thrift shop / She lost touch with Ken / and doesn’t even miss him – More HERE.

10. Academy Awards host Jimmy Kimmel read a social media post from his phone: “Has there ever been a worse host than Jimmy Kimmel at The Oscars. His opening was that of a less than average person trying too hard to be something which he is not, and never can be. Get rid of Kimmel and perhaps replace him with another washed up, but cheap, ABC ‘talent,’ George Slopanopoulos. He would make everybody on stage look bigger, stronger, and more glamorous. Blah. Blah. Blah. Make America Great Again.”

11. “I’m surprised you’re still up. Isn’t it past your jail time?” Jimmy Kimmel said after reading Donald Trump’s criticism of his hosting skills live at Sunday’s Oscars. The audience cheered. Watch HERE. 

12. As he won his first Oscar as best actor for Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy said, “We made a film about the man who created the atomic bomb, and for better or worse, we are all living in Oppenheimer’s world. So I would really like to dedicate this to the peacemakers everywhere.”

13. Cillian is the first Irish actor to win an Oscar. He’s from Cork, where my paternal grandmother was born. He closed his acceptance speech with a Gaelic saying, go raibh mile maith agat, which is translated as “a thousand thank yous.”

________Thirteen Thursday