Posts in the “personal” category

Here’s a story about what I call “Wrong Thinking.”

Way back in high school when I was playing baseball, a pitcher named Catfish Hunter became the first baseball player to get paid over a million dollars a year. I thought that was crazy, in a bad way. One day I talked to my dad about it, and asked him why people like farmers and engineers who did more important work didn’t get paid like that.

He didn’t have a great answer at the time, and that thought kept on bothering me. These days I think a correct answer he could have given me goes like this: “Baseball is in the entertainment business, just like singers and actors. For whatever reason — some sort of supply and demand, and a need for entertainment — society is willing to pay those people a lot of money. So if the money bothers you, what you can do is make that money just like Catfish Hunter, and then give it away however you see fit.”

During a recent cross-country drive I listened to the book The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light by Carlos Santana. I’m not a huge fan of his music — though I love this work with Faith Hill — but I am interested in him because he’s very open about his spirituality. Although I haven’t finished the book yet, I’ll give it a “thumbs up” rating. The book is his autobiography, and includes stories about playing professionally and hanging around in strip clubs when he was 13, everything related to the band Santana, growing up with a strict mother and abusive father, and much more.

Something I just realized when writing a friend is that after my parents were divorced — after my dad divorced my mom — everyone but my dad was much happier.

During my senior year of high school my parents were still married and my dad had a child with a woman who wasn’t my mother, which led to the divorce. He could be verbally abusive at times — extremely so — and in our high school photos we often looked like the most depressed family in the world. But after he left, everyone felt more free to be themselves without fear of reprisal.

Here’s a great story about a woman who turned a tree stump from a 110 year old tree into a little library.

“No, no, no ... come on old man, just let me back up before you start walking behind me”, I mutter to myself, looking back behind the right side of my rental car. I had a twelve hour drive to get here, and now I need to move my car out of this parking space like the pretty girl at the front desk asked.

This is olde-tyme movie week at the Alexander household in Colorado (a tiny apartment, actually). Here are two images from the end of Flashdance, which I first saw at a theatre in Barrington, Illinois in 1983.

“The brain is the hardest part of the body to adjust in asanas.”

~ B.K.S. Iyengar

“One must do asana not merely as a physical exercise but as a means to understand and then integrate our body with our breath, with our mind, with our intelligence, with our consciousness, and with our core. In this way, one can experience true integration.”

B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Life: The Yoga Journey

“True concentration is an unbroken thread of awareness. Yoga is about how the Will can free us from the wavering mind and outwardly directed senses. This is how asana serves us.”

~ B.K.S. Iyengar

“Always stretch from the source, the core, the foundation of each asana. Keep your attention internal, not worrying about what others see, but what the Self sees. Each movement must be an art, an art in which the Self is the only spectator.”

B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Life: The Yoga Journey (with a few minor edits by me)

Surprise of the day: If you do the math, you’ll find that “baby” (Jennifer Grey) was 27 years old when the movie Dirty Dancing was released (probably 26 during filming).

If you’re feeling charitable, my niece is running a Make-A-Wish fundraiser.

Some interesting comments from former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker in this article:

“We’re in a hell of a mess in every direction,” Volcker told the Times. “Respect for government, respect for the Supreme Court, respect for the president, it’s all gone. Even respect for the Federal Reserve. And it’s really bad. At least the military still has all the respect. But I don’t know, how can you run a democracy when nobody believes in the leadership of the country?”

“The central issue is we’re developing into a plutocracy,” Volcker told the Times. “We’ve got an enormous number of enormously rich people that have convinced themselves that they’re rich because they’re smart and constructive. And they don’t like government, and they don’t like to pay taxes.”

Just a few months before he died, a nice man who worked at the local Walmart shared this story this morning while I was checking out:

“You know, I’ve been married 54 years.”

[long pause. you can tell he’s thinking about something.]

“One time, a long time ago, I was sitting on the couch, watching tv, and I could feel her staring at me. I mean I could just feel it. So I turned and looked at her and said, ‘What?’”

“She said, ‘You know what.’ I said, ‘No, I don’t.’ She just got up and walked away.”

“You know, to this day I still have no idea what I did.”

[long pause]

“I think sometimes in a relationship you just have to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ even if you don’t know exactly what you did or didn’t do.”

In the ancient Sanskrit language, the word “dakini” can be interpreted as a female embodiment of enlightenment, an outstanding female practitioner in yoga and meditation.

In Tibet, the word for dakini is “khadroma,” and it literally means “female sky-traveler.”

This is a good espn.com article about John Elway. This is my favorite quote regarding programming and running a business: “He based his approach to scouting on Jack’s golden rule: ‘Look for heart first.’”

Whenever I have a bad allergic reaction to something, I’m glad that my throat doesn’t close. It did that one time in Alaska before anyone knew anything about mast cell disease, and I was fortunate to survive that one. It’s a strange feeling to feel your neck/throat rapidly swelling and closing around your trachea. (I always keep at least one bottle of liquid Benadryl around for times like this.)

“I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, that once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

~ James Baldwin (via this gratefulness.org page)

As a note for any doctors or medical students/researchers out there, I had a pelvic MRI 72 hours after a coronary angiogram, and the MRI dramatically reduced my femoral artery pain. I don’t know if the MRI just helped with the symptoms, or did something that helped heal the wound, but the pain relief was significant. On the way into the MRI I was walking very slow, and on the way out I could walk at a normal pace. If anyone reads this, I hope that’s a helpful hint for someone else out there.

For more information on this, here’s my story of a possible heart attack, nuclear stress test, coronary angiogram, a pheochromocytoma, and an MRI.

In a related note, I found this bandage on the place where the doctors went in on my femoral artery.

These “You are sweeter than bee vomit” cards are one of my all-time favorites.