Posts in the “personal” category

After learning that the Sage Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico has bed bugs in 2023, I’ve been trying to learn more about them. I asked ChatGPT how long bed bugs have been around, and it provided this answer (which I edited a little bit for brevity and clarity):

Bed bugs have been around for a very long time, with evidence suggesting they have been associated with humans for thousands of years ... Historical records indicate that bed bugs were present in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. They have been mentioned in ancient writings, including early medical texts. Bed bugs became more widespread in Europe during the 17th century and reached their peak infestation levels in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Old woman, trying to make a man feel guilty: “What would your mother say?”

Man: “She’d say, ‘I’ve been dead for ten years, leave me alone.’”

~ an episode of Midsomer Murders

I recently started having some symptoms of having an infection, especially cold chills and a mild fever, so I began taking big doses of Vitamin C. Yesterday the symptoms went away, so I began to wonder if the Vitamin C helped, and if so, how Vitamin C helps the human body’s immune system. So I asked ChatGPT, and got the following answer, which I have edited for clarity:

Vitamin C, also known as ascorbic acid, plays a crucial role in supporting the human immune system in several ways:

There’s a void in my heart I can’t seem to fill
I do charity work when I believe in the cause
But my soul, it bothers me still
Hey, Lord, you made me like I am
Can You heal this restlessness?
Will there be a void in my heart
When they carry me out to rest?

~ John Mellencamp

A young girl working in a doctor’s office was kind enough to refer to me as an “old guy” a few days ago. Yesterday I watched the first Firefly episode and laughed when I saw Shepherd Book referred to as “grandpa” several times. (“I never married,” he muttered in reply to Kaylee.)

~ March 27, 2014

“I have no idea who that guy was, but I know that he just reset our karmic destiny.”

Part of a story from the book, Love Everyone.

I honor the place in you
Where the entire universe resides.
I honor the place in you
Of love, of light, of truth, of peace.

I honor the place in you
Where if you are in that place in you and
I am in that place in me,
There is only one of us.

~ The meaning of the word “Namaste,” as interpreted by Ram Dass.

(If I remember correctly, I found this hand-carved Namaste plaque at the Tibetan Cultural Center in Bloomington, Indiana, where I spent some time meditating many moons ago.)

One of my nieces (and/or her friends) seems to be interested in Siberian Huskies, which last night led me to dig out this old photo from a business newspaper in Louisville, Kentucky, in April, 2004.

I just ran across this photo of my old-old apartment in Broomfield, Colorado. I liked using a shoji screen to add a temporary “wall” in different spaces, and I used to keep Christmas lights going for most of the winter evenings, as shown.

Rocky Balboa, talking to his son:

“And when things got hard, you started looking for something to blame, like a big shadow. Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done.”

I enjoyed this quote from Rocky Balboa the first time I saw the movie, and I appreciate it even more now after getting my a** kicked by this f-ing blood disease, but still grinding along every day.

[Note: This is a chapter from a currently-unpublished book I’m (slowly) writing on meditation and mindfulness.]

As a spiritual being, one possible way to think of life here on Earth is as a “game” that serves as a training ground for the soul. It’s a game like other games, so it has many levels, and they get harder and harder as you progress. So in this case, the better you become at the game of spirituality — The Soul Game — the harder the levels become.

If you’re interested in baseball — especially pitching — this is a terrific discussion between “Pitching Ninja” Rob Friedman and Hall of Fame pitcher Greg Maddux.

In a personal note, back in the day I had an opportunity that would have allowed me to pitch with Greg’s brother Mike Maddux, but my shoulder wouldn’t hold up.

As a brief note, here are my favorite songs of late:

• Peter Gabriel, Four Kinds of Horses
• Thrice, Daedalus (based on the story of the flight of Icarus)
• Gloria Estafan, Coming Out of the Dark
• U2, Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me
• Zach Sobiech, Clouds (Up Up Up)

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”

~  Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

If only ... I had a little bit more time
If only ... I had a little bit more time with you

I fell down, down, down
Into this dark and lonely hole
There was no one there to care about me anymore
And I needed a way to climb and grab a hold of the edge
You were sitting there holding a rope

...

And maybe someday I’ll see you again
We’ll float up in the clouds and we’ll never see the end

~ from Clouds (Up Up Up) by Zach Sobiech

A poem from the tv series Monk:

“Hold me, Adrian,
my darling husband.

True love’s touch is so rare a gift.
How much more precious is your caress
who loves so deeply,
yet fears the warmth,
of hand on hand.

Still your love is given free,
only to me,
only to me.”

~ Trudy Monk

I started watching Dawson’s Creek recently because I was curious what Joshua Jackson was like before Fringe, and I have to say — I know their conversations are intentionally verbose — but even in the short talks between Dawson and his parents, my relationship with my parents was nothing like that. We never talked about things because my mom was very sick and my dad was very domineering and abusive. So I watch this show and wonder, is that what parental relationships are really like in a healthy household?

I’ve always used some sort of Kanban technique in my brain, long before I knew the formal meaning of a Kanban board or Kanban process. But in the last few years I started using a whiteboard as my Kanban board, and I really like it. It makes me more organized and productive, and I feel like the productive part is because it makes work and progress visible. In my entire computer programming career I have always liked the term, “make work visible,” and Kanban and Scrum are the epitome of that.

Imagine being 30 years old, and life is good. You’re healthy, vibrant, and even astonishingly good at math.

But then just a few moments later you can’t make sense of the world. You don’t know what’s real and what’s not.

You begin hearing voices that aren’t there. Maybe you see things that aren’t there.

Shortly after this you’re put into a “mental institution.”

That’s what happened to my mom. For whatever reason, shortly after I was born, she was stricken with schizophrenia.

(If you’ve ever seen the tv series Fringe, my mom is almost exactly like Walter Bishop, or vice-versa.)

A few people I’ve talked to recently who have (or had) cancer told me they can clearly remember the moment when their doctor told them that they had cancer.

In my case I do remember the conversation with the doctor, but that was more of a formality. When I picked up the phone to talk to her, I already had a pad of paper and a pencil in hand, and I was ready to write down the details she was going to tell me. Because in my case I was pretty certain that I had cancer when I saw the ultrasound results a few days earlier.