print.pitas.com | happy lists :) Wow. A while back, I submitted a Happy List to the Happy Lists Site, over at print.pitas.com. Today it seems this list has finally gotten posted, for the Monday, August 11th posting. Maybe it’s a reminder to try be a little more epicurean, appreciate the little things a little more and find those unique joys that only dumplings or a a cup of coffee can give one.
This weekend’s been difficult, painful and harsh on me, for reasons so complicated I don’t know how to broach them here. So I’ll just post a good quote I found from Aristotle’s Poetics: Tragedy is essentially an imitation not of persons but of action and life, of happiness and misery. All human happiness or misery takes the form of action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of activity, not a quality. Character gives us qualities, but it is in our actions ?what we do ?that we are happy or the reverse. This is important to remember. …
In my second kids’ class – the younger class, incidentally – the kids found something unusual on the floor. On excruciatingly cute stationery was written a note from a girl named J– H– to a girl named H– K—. I understood some, but not enough to figure out what was being said about me. However, a friend read it and banished my misgivings with a rendering that went something like this: What’s up? This is J– H–. You heard? Gord, Thai, and John R. are going back to their hometowns [in their home countries]! They won’t be teaching here anymore! …
Last week my sister asked me to write a story to use at her work. She works for an NGO called the Mennonite Central Committee, which works at international development and is quite respected. The program she’s working in now is really very interesting. It’s called the In Exile, For a While Refugee Simulation Program. They take young people out on refugee experience simulations, complete with exploding landmines, starvation diets, nasty border guards, and long forced marches in awful weather, to give them a better idea of how to imagine a refugee’s experience: take this one awful day and imagine …
Charlie gave me this. (Link deleted since the site has changed radically. Try this instead. Probably not the same thing, but… it’s fun.) I should know by now that Charlie always gives me weird things, but they still always surprise me. We humans are such a weird species.