More Miscellania

Sunday is cleaning day.  I try and clean something - my bedroom, the storage room, the living areas.  Today I washed the couch cover, gathered a bag of books for trade or giveaway, tossed out a full supermarket brown bag of receipts and mail and paper trash.  Ephemera.  I love ephemera (transitory written matter not meant to retained or preserved: ticket stubs, brochures, maps, receipts, etc), and I keep a lot of my own.

Today when I was sorting things, I came across a few items of ephemera from my desk area. They seemed amusing so I'll share:

• A scrap of paper with the phrase "I chipped my tooth in Amsterdam but I had no idea at the time."  Vaguely literary - wonder why I wrote it down
• A small piece of fluorescent yellow paper with the following on it" 1) Old Testament - "A new friend is as new wine: when it is old, thou shalt drink it with pleasure." 2) "When asked what wine he liked to drink, he replied 'That which belongs to another.'" Diogenes Laertius, 200 A.D. and 3) "Wine is wont to show the mind of man." Theognis, 570 - 490 B.C.E.  Not sure why I was gathering wine-related quotes.
• A post card from my brother from 2009: "Dear Sis, This is the Blue Hole that I dove recently on my dive trip to Belize....well, OK, I bought the postcard in Belize in 1998 and had been meaning to send it.  Better late than never.  Love Always, your brother."
• A post card from my friend E, with whom I have a postcard-heavy relationship" "OK, so if I come to your city and tour my old haunts - is it still a postcard opportunity - even if forgot to send the card for a month?"  People apparently like to send me old postcards; I understand, I do the same thing.  I'm grateful anyone sends postcards still.
• And finally, my old Zen chant, from the days I used to do that: Kan Ze On / Na Mu Butsu Yo / Butus U In Yo / Butsu U En / Bup Po So En / Jo Raku Ga Jo / Chon Nen Kan Ze o / Bo Nen Kan Ze On / Nen Nen Ju Shin Ki / Nen Nen Fu Ri Shin."

What else is going on?  The weather - not to be mundane - has been shockingly consistent, with its fog fog fog.  Every day, some fog. Some days, all fog.  It's ultimately rather dispiriting.  I'm headed to New York next weekend, and the forecast is for high 70's / low 80's - but WITH thunderstorms, or showers.  And I think what kind of weather is *that*?  I mean, how does one dress for that?  I can do Europe in the fall, and Cairo in October, and New York in winter and Las Vegas in the summer - but none of those are warm and wet.

A new phrase #1: Cold Hearted Hot Heads

My friends and I were having one of those pleasant, aimless, Friday night discussions, about whatever subjects we wanted, and we started discussing an existing phenonoma in the world which causes a lot of trouble, which is the proliferation of persons who have hot dispositions, who are hot tempered, but then very cold and reserved, emotionally.  This is the type of person who will start wars, or blow up buildings, or be a terribly destructive president or dictator.  The cold-hearted hot-head is NOT the person you want.

Instead - as Vision Activist Caroline Casey likes to say - we want cool heads, people who react with measure, reason, maturity, consideration, responsibility.  When angry, we want to think of (or actually carry out the action of) pouring cool water on our heads; the original meaning of "cool" was this sort of zen, go-with-the-flow, low key, flexible reaction to wild things.  It allowed us to expand as people, to consider, and maybe accept, things we feel to be foreign at first.  Cool heads.  And of course, with that, warm hearts.  Compassion, kindness, love, empathy.  All the good things.  You mix the two and you get responsible compassion.  Mature kindness.  Don't those sound good?

So, please, if you like, start using the phrase "cold-hearted hot heads" as an example of what NOT to do; feel free to call it out - outloud or just to yourself - when you see it happening.  This is how things will change, with these small progressions toward sanity.

A New Phrase #2

I was in a meeting on Friday afternoon, a fairly high-level active meeting with quite a few co-workers I like but don't see very often.  We had some jokes and laughs while doing our collaborative work, and at one point, the women next to me said something like "We are all feeling plateful --" as in "my plate is full," which is what corporate Americans say to each other when they can't handle any additional work.  She meant to say something else, or I heard her wrong - she speaks quickly - and everyone just let it pass by, but I had to come back to it. "Did you just coin a phrase?" I said. "Plateful - like a description of --"

"Like, 'Don't bother me, I really plateful right now'?" suggested someone else, interrupting me, and then room was off for about 10 seconds, considering it, adding it to test phrases, clarifying the definition and how to use it - all of this informally, in just a few sentences of us talking over each other, Robert Altman style - and laughing, of course.  We all agreed to use it, and then we went merrily back to our subject matter.  We'll see if it sticks.

That's about all I have for the moment.