I thought these would make good words of advice for our presidential candidates. From an ice cream store called PollyAnn in the Sunset District (I got a free peanut butter and oreo cookie ice cream cone by spinning the wheel – yum!).
Yearly Archives: 2008
Central Valley Sunset
Driving home from LA on the 5. Nostalgic, but I don’t miss the haze (or smells) at all!
The Perfect Sandwich
Today I rejoice, for I have finally figured out MY perfect Subway Sandwich:
6-inch whole wheat
Veggie Patty, toasted with Pepperjack cheese
Avocado
Fresh Spinach
Black Olives
Yellow Sweet peppers
Sweet Onion Sauce
Yum!
Ever-Changing
When I was young
The stories made sense.
The lessons were clear.
The entertainment was pure.
The more I learned
The more critical I became,
Lest I seem foolish.
I reasoned and dissected
And sorted fact and fiction
According to what I 'knew.'
But Alas,
The more I learned
The less I knew.
And I came back to my child
For knowledge built on reason is
But a house on shifting ground
I've seen facts come and go.
What was the last great fact after the earth is round and we are not the center of the universe?
Don't bore me with your new facts,
Fool's gold.
Science is finite and I'm a skeptic that it can tell us anything we really need to know.
Yes it is useful, like the Neanderthal's tools.
Chip away at this disease.
Keep you from playing the lottery.
But leaning on science for all your answers is a limitation.
You will only be as wise as the number of theories in your pocket.
Know that everything you need to know is all around you.
Science is a magnifying lens through which we explore a part of the whole.
But the possibilities and joy are endless through the eyes of a child.
As I change, so do my theories.
But the infinite is infinite.
Thank God.
Building on yesterday…
Music and unconditional love are as close to Truth as I have come.
Horror-scopes, or just Astrology
On my slow journey out of the deep, scary forest of no-no taboos that was my sheltered youth, I have discovered the joy and intrigue of Astrology. Believe it or not, it’s actually not the black magic witchcraft I was led to believe it was!
I remembered back to a post I had done a while back when I went to astrology.com and got my “chart” done for like $9.99. A 19-page report came with it, all of it so specifically accurate it was spooky. Well, since then, I’ve been noticing things like my supervisor for my morning “homeland security” job, as my father likes to refer to it, reminding me constantly of my “Aries” qualities (he’s quite fond of Astrology), and most of them make a lot of sense. So last night, as I celebrated with birthday cake and ice cream, I borrowed an old coffee table book of Astrology from my housemate last night and looked into it some more.
I found out that there is the sign everyone knows about, roughly correlated to your month of birth, known as your “Sun” sign. Then, there is a lesser known “Moon” sign, that is a secondary characteristic. I am a Taurus moon sign, which explains why people often describe me as “balanced,” as their characteristics are somewhat opposing. There are something like 12 different “Houses” that the different planets can affect, and each house describes certain aspects of your life. The analogy given was like a vintage of a grape – you can tell how good a wine is (or guess what its characteristics are without drinking it) by knowing the date the grape was “born.”
I also learned that the art of reading the planetary alignment at the time of one’s birth is an art & science that has been around for thousands of years, and the current form is a kind of synergy that happened around the 1400’s, combining Astrological data and observations from all Asian and East-Asian cultures (and probably more, I didn’t read very deeply).
Anyway, I also liked the references to Carl Jung in the Astrology book. Jung and I share the idea that traditions like religion, Yoga, Astrology, Music, and Art forms like mandalas continue to exist because they each touch on some universal truth that is primarily intuitive. I suppose Art and Music even more so than the more tangible things like Astrology and Yoga, which seem more science-based, being developed on thousands of years of observations of internal and external objects and phenomenon.
I’m going to try not to drive anyone in my life crazy with my newfound passion for Astrology, but it’s hard to contain my enthusiasm sometimes! I asked all my immediate family members for their Birth location, Date, and Time of Birth, the 3 crucial factors in an Astrology chart. Fun for me!
Happy Birthday to Me
Yes, check my About Me page and you will see I’ve been traveling around as Christina Margaret McKinstry for 28 rotations around the sun…very exciting!
I’m still trying to figure out a way to help my boyfriend understand that a birthday is a wonderful thing to be celebrated and shared with the people you love. Live a little bit!
To poorly paraphrase a great philosopher: There is no difference between living and dying. Everything is an expression of the infinite. Why, then, he was asked, do you not kill yourself? Because, he replied, there is no difference!
That might not sound uplifting to some! However, to me, it means: Do everything, and live every day with a deep sense of happiness and joy, because every action you take is part of a larger plan which we may never understand with our finite consciousness. You are EXACTLY who you are supposed to be today, half choice, half chance.
Beautiful Day
It's a beautiful day to be bedridden. I've been K.O.'d by my second major illness of the season, but it couldn't be a nicer day. The sun is high in a cloudless sky. My bedroom window is totally open and a cool sea breeze keeps whipping through sporadically, calming my fever, while I lay bundled up in my down comforter with my loyal feline friend closeby.
I began noticing something was wrong 4 or 5 days ago, as I started to lose my appetite and felt bloated whenever I would eat. I haven't been feeling particularly stressed, though I have been working every day of the week. I even took myself to a movie last week to chill out. So, this time around the sickness is a mystery.
It is nice to have a couple of days in bed, though.
Nice Pose
I found this (dead) bee on the discus throwing sector and I brought it back to this rail to photograph it. The bees must have some kind of respect for the dead however, because a couple minutes after I took its picture, I got dive-bombed by a living bee. I assume its friends tried to hold it back, but it broke free in its grief for a kamikaze mission. Nonetheless, a cool picture, I thought.
One More Thing
Since when was being too busy to sit down for a well-prepared meal a sign of prospering?
Since starting to ride the subway & muni, my life has been LESS stressful. Instead of hurrying from place to place, I just go with the flow, and enjoy the downtime. George Carlin's idea that each child should have 3 hours daily of daydreaming should apply to adults too.
I notice that when I don't take those 3 hours (broken up throughout the day, usually), I get stressed and start to feel like the world is passing me by (when, in actuality, I'm the one in motion).
I feel great today!