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Solitude and Quietness

Solitude and Quietness… no I am not Superman in his Fortress of Solitude.

I came across this click bait article in my news feed with the words weird and intelligent grabbing my attention.

10 Weird Habits of Highly Intelligent People

It did make me wonder about a large group of folks, especially the generations younger than me , Z, X, Epsilon, Millennials, Omega, Alpha, Cherrio, whatever it is they are calling them these days.

There seems to be all too many folks that have to have music, video, some form of input constantly streaming into their heads.  When does this leave time for quite reflection and daydreaming?

Of course, one of our neighbors, a gentleman several years older than I, cannot be outside without plugging in.  Since he must be nearly deaf, he has his rock and roll from the 60s and 70s cranked up in his huge radar operator earphones.  If he is walking his dog, I can hear him a football field away.

A few years back, without conscious decision, I started leaving the radio/CD player off in my vehicles the majority of the time.   Especially when I was jogging or now when I am riding my bike, it is a qualitative difference between doing those activities with audio input versus listening to your own self.  When I realized this, I quit plugging in so much when I was doing those sort of activities.

We all walk this world in our own moccasins, but I do worry about folks constantly plugged in without quiet time for their self.

And so it goes.

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Quote of the Day – José Mujica

Former Uruguayan President, José Mujica, when asked why he lived as if he were poor, he insisted that he did not need to have more things to be happy.

“I am not a poor president. The poor are not those who have little, but those who need a lot. I do not live with poverty, I live with austerity, with renunciation. I need little to live well.” ~~ José Mujica

I am utterly fascinated by this man, a former president of Uruguay.  As president of Uruguay he refused to live in the presidential palace, preferring to continue living in his home on a small farm on the outskirts of Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. Plus at that time he got around town in an old beat up blue VW Bug.

From Wikipedia:

“Mujica has been described as “the world’s humblest head of state” due to his austere lifestyle and his donation of around 90 percent of his $12,000 monthly salary to charities that benefit poor people and small entrepreneurs.An outspoken critic of capitalism’s focus on stockpiling material possessions which do not contribute to human happiness, he has been praised by the media and journalists for his philosophical ideologies; the Times Higher Education referred to him as the ‘philosopher president’ in 2015, a play on words of Plato’s conception of the philosopher king.”

Not only is he a politician, but he is also a deep thinking philosopher.  The world could use more leaders like him.

I pulled this quote from an online Spanish review course I have been taking at  1001ReasonsToLearnSpanish.  Below is the quote as I originally found it.

Cuando se le preguntaba por qué vivía como si fuera pobre, él insistía en que no le hacía falta tener más cosas para ser feliz. “Yo no soy un presidente pobre. Pobres no son los que tienen poco, sino los que necesitan mucho. Yo no vivo con pobreza, vivo con austeridad, con renunciamiento. Preciso poco para vivir bien”. 

To see more Quotes for Day, visit this link: Quotes for the Day

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #2,503

yeah I know you did not ask!

You should so be blessed – well cursed at times actually – with a mind such as mine, making all these weird connections between my rumored neurons. Just be thankful that I do not share all of my random thoughts.

Friends do not let friends spend hours careening down the YouTube or Facebook rabbit holes.

Put that cell phone down on the ground and step back 2 paces… DO IT NOW! Don’t make me hide your charger again.

Just saying.

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A Pete Morton song for our times: Two Brothers

Pete Morton is absolutely one of my favorite folk singers of all time.  While I love his voice and his simple guitar playing, the real beauty of his music is in his message and the way he crafts the words and images.

He is English, lives in London, and performs mostly in England, Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany.  Occasionally, he will drift over to the States and play at The Focal Point here is St. Louis. If there were any sanity in the music business he would be better known that he is. Of course, folk music is a style that drifts in and out of popularity… but not with me.

Given that the situation in this world and this country seems to be degenerating more and more quickly,  I think what the world needs is Pete’s message in his song, Two Brothers, to be taken to heart.

Sometimes the greed, the lust for power, the lust for money, the absolute self-centeredness of so many folks, the need to impose your beliefs, your religion, your values on others, even against their will, just overwhelms me.  It is more than I can bear at times, and there really is no place to run. There is no alien inter-galactic ark coming to carry us safely to the proverbial mountain top.

Below is Pete Morton’s song Two Brothers. Enjoy, maybe even meditate on the message.

And so I wish it would go.

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Un Chicago or Una Chicago

Porous Frontiers

You do not really need to know another language to know that linguistic frontiers are very porous, resulting in words from one language being incorporated into another.

English is a wonderful example of this, beginning life as a Germanic language that imposed itself on the native tongues of what was to become Scotland, England and some extent, Ireland.  That mash-up, in its turn, having Nordic languages stamped on top of it.  The Normans were so kind as to invade, Continue reading “Un Chicago or Una Chicago”

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Eurasian Tree Sparrow

I would not really call myself a birder, but birds have always fascinated me.  We keep a 4 station feeder outside our kitchen window and hummingbird feeders on the porch during the warmer season.  A time or two Señora has complained that the birds were eating us out of house and home, but she keeps buying seed. They are definitely fun to watch and we get more than a few species taking advantage of our generosity.

I have a Biology degree that specialized on the zoological side of the science.  One of my regrets is Continue reading “Eurasian Tree Sparrow”

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Matrimonial Log – Star Date 5784.004

“Matrimony… the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Casamiento Segundo, its until-death-do-us-part mission… to explore a strange new relationship… to seek out a new life and new adventures… to boldly go where no sane couple has gone before.”

I am reasonably sure I know the answer to the question.

The question: Is it harder for an OCD person to live with non-OCD person, or vice versa?

Señora has had two major surgeries on her back. This has put limitations on what she can and cannot do. It is just part of our reality as the two of us age.

One thing she finds difficult is loading items into the bottom rack of the dishwasher.  As much as possible I try to take on this household chore.  I have explained to her multiple times that I do not mind loading and unloading the machine.  I really don’t mind doing the dishes manually as it is one of those household tasks that you can step back from when done and feel a sense of completion. However, like many household chores as soon as you turn around and say Beetlejuice three times, it needs to be done again.

My mother’s attitude growing up was that she had five sons and a husband to feed; she was not going to also wash dishes for that crew.  In my first bout of matrimonial fever, once the kids reached a certain age, we all took turns washing dishes, marking our turn on the calendar.  The goal was to have everyone with the same number of turns at the end of month. As a teenager, I washed dishes “professionally” at a few different restaurants.   After all that, I would just as soon load the dishwasher.

I started out talking about OCD.  When I load the dishwasher I do it a certain way.  I try to group spoons with spoons, knives with knives, dinner plates with dinner plates, etc.  I do this as it requires less sorting when I am unloading the dishwasher, simplifying and speeding up the operation.

Since Señora only partially listens to me, being a founding mother of the Idle Hands School, she will frequently just hand wash the dishes. She will also occasionally add items to the dishwasher. I was cleaning up after some meal, and I had gone through the exercise of reordering the dirty dishes in the dishwasher after her additions earlier in the day.  Since Señora was in the kitchen with me, I thought I would explain my system to her.

After I had completed my little spiel on the OCD way of loading the machine, she looked at me with arched eyebrows – thankfully she did not peer at me over her glasses ala my mother – and said, “Good luck with that Melvin Udall.”

Yup, I am reasonably sure I know the answer.

And so it goes.

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Vanity Plate for the Day – 8SCNDS

8SCNDS

This was on the back of a F-150 pickup truck.  Its message was reinforced by a sticker on the back windshield that read “Cowboy Up”.  8 seconds is the amount of time a rodeo cowboy must stay on a bull or bucking bronco to qualify for a score.  Having known a couple bull riders, they are some crazy mo-fos.

I have not put out a Vanity Plate posting for a while, mainly because I am retired and not spending an hour and half or two hours a day commuting to and from downtown St. Louis.  When I did I used the exercise of deciphering vanity plates as a way to help pass the time in rush hour traffic.

To see more Vanity Plates of the Day for this link: Vanity Plates of the Day