Napoleon: The spiritual to the physical needs are 3:1

Word of God is like a sword, a shield, armor, fire, a hammer that breaks rocks

Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart

Some of my favorite passages:

Nature of God (p276):

"God is patient and subtle. God works through process and not through magic, not through snapping the divine fingers. That's what we learn from seeing the history of creation as science has revealed it. And I think that tells us something about how God acts generally. When you think about it, if God is really a God whose nature is best described as being the God of love, then that is how love will work. Not by overwhelming force, but by persuasive process."

(p271)

"If creatures are going to make themselves, to explore this potentiality, there will be blind alleys and ragged edges in that exploration…It's the shadow side of a world allowed to make itself."

Chaos and Creation (p267)

"There's a very interesting scientific insight which says that regions where real novelty occurs, where really new things happen that you haven't seen before, are always regions on the edge of chaos…If you're too much on the orderly side of that borderline, everything is so rigid that nothing really new happens. You just get rearrangements. If you're too far on the haphazard side, nothing persists, everything just falls apart…Where order and disorder interlace, where really new things happen, [that's] where the action is, if you like."

Love & Depression (p233)

"And the feeling of love couldn't exist without a range of other feelings that surround it, the primary one being the fear of loss. If the loss of someone you love didn't make you sad, then what substance would the love have? Therefore the emotional range that includes great sadness and great pain is essential to the kind of love and attachment that we form."

Darwin on death (p113)

"Sic transit gloria mundi with a vengeance"

"And so passes the world with a vengeance"

The death of one person is nothing compared with the death of millions of species throughout recorded history in the collapse of the solar system.

I woke up on Christmas morning
And found your gifts under my tree
Memories of you and me
I unwrapped them eagerly
And replayed them, one-by-one
Treasures of love, lust, and fun!

Dad: You’re not going to have kids, you’re gonna have calculators. You tell him I said that. Just let me know if you name your first one R2 or D2.

Mom, I don’t have frickin’ fibromyalgia! I’ve slept on 7 different beds the past 7 nights.

Me: Mom, how would you describe my personality when I was 10 years old? Am I still the same?
Dad (raises eyebrow): Weird
Me: I didn’t ask you, Dad!
Mom: Bouncy, bubbly…the same. Inquisitive, involved.

Dad: Want some hot Dr. Pepper with lemon? It’s what ails ya…

“There’s no higher endeavor than responsible parenting. It’s right up there with Mother Theresa in my book. It takes everything: courage, faith, love and sacrifice.” -Michael Carignan

“A parent needs to be truly present. A parent should be able to reflect back to the child the love and light that they bring into the world.” -paraphrasing Jane Fonda from yesterday’s Oprah Winfrey show

I can’t imagine what God is preparing for me
Those mysterious ways
Have stretched my heart to its widest

I’m so ready to give and receive
Where are you? And how has life tested you?
How have you arrived at me
More ready to make Love with me than any man before?

And if life really is what the women say it is:
A series of undeniable nudgings and signposts along a preordained path of enlightenment,
This is surely good timing.

My confusion is for my probing
Your pain is for your pondering
God has given us this time
So that we may know our deepest desires
And purify ourselves of our deepest flaws

Arrive at me knowing what your heart is capable of
We need a common understanding of Love
So that we may never retreat away from each other into the dark corners of our hearts

I want to pulse off you
Always
Resonate
Reverberate
So we can amplify
And fill our world with
Light, Laughter, and Love

Does nail biting satisfy an oral fixation or a finger sensation?

My guess is its an oral fixation. If this is the case, why do nail biters not like to chew gum? (I only have 2 data points on this!)

Is there something else they could chew/bit/suck on that would satisfy the nervous tension? Is it the texture of the nail and repeated biting/eating that provides the stress relief? Or is it the pain of cutting close to the nail bed? Or is it the removing of an imperfection from the edge of the nail (which ultimately perpetuates a cycle of unhealthy/imperfect nail edges).

My nervous habit of choice has never been nail biting (a habit which has already shown up in my 5-year-old housemate), but for me it is hair texture obsession. I get some kind of trance-like calming/focus sensation from running my nails down a hair shaft searching for imperfections. I’ve done this from at least age 11 I think. When I find an imperfection I break the hair at that point and inspect it.

Looking for parallels, I’m wondering if the hair pulling is stimulating for the scalp, which helps disperse electrical mental energy around the skull. Just as nail biting might direct mental energy toward the front of the skull, perhaps activating the frontal lobes? Or perhaps both nervous habits are simply triggered by a lack of motion/exercise in athletic creatures, a way of activating the hands to deal with excess energy stores.

Why don’t schools teach us
How to love each other?
Why is love ed
Reserved for Sunday school and broken homes?
15 minutes a week of wisdom
Would keep
Thousands of men and women
From giving up on themselves
And doubting life’s abundance
Why are 70-year-old men
Still worried about wives cheating?
No one showed them how to be happy
Misery finds company

Steve Martin’s 5 Christmas Wishes!

*31-day orgasm once a year
*Revenge over enemies
*Absolute power over every living being
*$30 million a month tax-free in a Swiss bank account
*All the children of the world to hold hands and sing in peace and perfect harmony

I love this! Such a great commentary on the human condition :-)

Up at mom & dad’s house over Christmas holiday, and trying to explain why making 100K/year working for the oil industry is totally unattractive to me, even with the option of bankruptcy looming. It feels like a step backward, not forward; I have nothing more to offer/learn from them; I am not at all interested; there are more important things than money, etc. None of these reasons appeases my father, and I remind him that I have not asked for his advice on the matter.

All I can think to do is keep exposing myself more socially in my city, keep reading/learning about things that interest me, and keep my eyes open for opportunities.