Forgiveness

A friend of mine just shared this story; I'm not sure where he found it, but I thinks it's worth sharing and remembering.

Two friends were walking through the desert. During some point of the journey, they had an argument and one friend slapped the other in the face.

The one who got slapped was hurt, but without saying anything, wrote in the sand:
"Today my best friend slapped me in the face"

They kept on walking until they found an oasis, where they decided to take a bath.

The one who had been slapped got stuck in the mire and started drowning, but the friend saved him.

After he recovered from the near-drowning, he wrote on a stone:
"Today my best friend saved my life"

The friend who had slapped and saved his best friend asked him, "After I hurt you, you wrote in the sand and now, you write on a stone. Why?"

The friend replied "When someone hurts us we should write it down in sand, where winds of forgiveness can erase it away. But when someone does something good for us, we must engrave it in stone where no wind can ever erase it."

Thoughts on Rumi

the mystic poet claims
“we come spinning out of nothingness,
scattering stars like dust"

sometimes i breathe deep deep into my belly
and am overcome by the need to
cough up nothing

perhaps it is a bit of star dust still glittering in me
leftover from when i too
scattered stars in my wake

English Pronunciation

(I know, it's a lot of words [heh, no pun intended] but it's awfully amusing and makes a good point.)


English Pronunciation 
by G. Nolst Trenité


Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation (think of Psyche!)
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

I Totally Won, Or, How to Make Swine Flu Work For You

The following conversation happened between me and another client while waiting for our group therapy session this evening:

Him: Oh, man, I was so sick last week!
Me: Aw, I'm sorry, what did you have?
Him: I had a nasty head cold. So, what did I miss in group last week?
Me: I dunno, I was out with the swine flu.

I so won, lol.

Dentally Disappointed

Some of you know I've been on a huge dental journey, getting all of the silver amalgam fillings out of my mouth. Partially I decided to do this because my blood does test high for some of the toxins found in the amalgam (and they are known to leech into the body over time), and partially because many of the fillings are decades old, and were causing my teeth to crack (this happens as the metal expands and contracts due to temperature variations, et cetera).

So it's been... I think I started this endeavor in August of 2011, and I've done 5 sedation visits (I can't handle dentistry without sedation, trust me) and 5 follow-up non-sedation visits (basically where they just check on their work and do a little filing as necessary). Today was the 6th, and was supposed to be the penultimate. Unfortunately the first tooth they got to work on, which needed a root canal, turned out to be pretty tricky (I'm not sure why; they don't tend to give a lot of details when you are drugged up with sedation, so I'll get the details at my follow up visit tomorrow). In the time they had intended to do 2 root canals and 2 fillings, they just worked on this one tooth.

The result is that one tooth is very sore (I've had plenty of other root canals during all this, but this is by far the most painful) and I still have 2 visits (barring further bizarreness) to complete this process. Right now I'm irritated and disappointed and in pain.

I am definitely totally grateful that I have both the means and the courage to do this, and I know that it will increase my health a lot... but for just tonight, I'm kinda down about it all.

Oasis of the Seas

I just got home from a totally amazing week, aboard Royal Caribbean's Oasis of the Seas with my grandmother, aunt, uncle, and two cousins. I plan to post day-by-day highlights, but first here are some overall stats for the ship:

(Note: this picture is from the website; I did not take it. There's never really a chance at this angle even when you aren't on the ship.)

She was built in Finland and her maiden voyage was December 5, 2009. In order to get out of the shipyard she had to go under a bridge that she was just a bit too tall for. In order to solve the problem they made her smokestacks retractable (just for this one bridge, they never need to retract again!) and went at the bridge full speed (just under 24 knots or 27.63 miles per hour), in order to get as low in the water as possible. They barely squeaked under!

She has props of a new design that can swivel/turn 360 degrees, so that she can literally turn in place!

She is one of the two largest cruise ships in the world (the other is her sister Oasis Class ship, Allure of the Seas [Allure is actually 2 inches longer, technically speaking...]) at 360 meters long (1,187 feet), 64 meters wide (208 feet), 65 meters above the waterline (213 feet), and a draft of about 9 meters (around 30 feet). She weighs in at 2225, 282 tons (out of water)!

She has 16 public decks and 2706 guest rooms which can hold up to 6300 guests. The staff hovers at around 2300 and during my cruise they represented 64 countries.

It has a zipline, 2 rock climbing walls, 2 flow-riders, 24 dining rooms, restaurants, et cetera, about 12,000 plants and trees including an onboard park, several theaters (live, movie, and aqua!), a boardwalk with a carousel, an ice skating rink (smaller than standard at 40 by 60 feet), a promenade, several pools and hot tubs... pretty much anything!

It was an absolutely amazing week!

Sugar As Safety

I had an interesting realization last night, that in my brain I have an over-coupling involving safety and sugar. To me, eating sugary foods feels like physical safety. Some where along the way those two ideas got wired into the same circuits in my brain (that's basically what over-coupling means, in this case).

When I was a kid, sugar was kinda verboten in my house, so whenever I got my sneaky little hands on some, I would hide to eat it. I think that's where this over coupling came from: the warm, cozy feeling of my hiding spots got mixed in with the act of eating the sweets.

I had this realization kind of out of the blue yesterday. Last night rather than going for a sugary snack, I did other things that felt like safety to me. It was a mildly successful experiment that I intend to continue.