"Before I understood the link between my beliefs and my feelings – and we are talking well into adulthood – and before I found a good way to regain custody of my feelings, my solution was to eat. Eating is sometimes the perfect solution, but only for one or two problems, like hunger. I always seemed to have, as the song goes, 99 problems. Which is another way of saying I weighed far too much."
-- Max Daniels on Taking Custody of your Emotions
"And for that matter, may I call as my witness Abraham Lincoln, who is reported to have walked up and down the street in Springfield, Ill., in the mid-1800s, pulling his young sons in a wagon while reading a book (and as the story goes, he went right on reading when a child fell out of the wagon)."
-- Dr. Perri Klass, The Guilty Secret of Distracted Parenting.
For the record, I read a lot of magazines while the kids were young. They were easier to carry and the articles were better suited to my non-existent attention span.
"I believe that what you defend against actually becomes stronger. This movement of people who want it to go back to the way it was before . . . time does not go back. Time goes forward. Time is actually right now. So those people, they’ve all been hoodwinked, and we all knew it. We know this trick. That’s why education is so important in our culture, because you don't have to look far back in history to know who’s used these same tactics before. That’s why it’s so dangerous. And the fact that people would fall for them again? You think, ‘Wait a minute, you don’t remember the last time this happened?’ [laughs] My thing is, I think that this whole administration will actually accelerate what they’re trying to defend against. What you defend against persists, and I think it’s a call to action for all of the like-minded people like ourselves to get involved."
-- RuPaul in Vanity Fair.
While trapped at home for the past two days thanks to nearly 3 feet of snow, I had time to write a column! Go, me!
Over on Instagram, an artist was embroidering handkerchiefs and giving them away during the month of February. It was, she (I think) said, it's "a project where I stitch what needs to be said on a hanky and send it to you. Dry your eyes and pass it along."
I got very, very lucky:
And, soon, I shall pass it along.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
-- Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms.