New image in the simply funny photography contest

Snapped this of my nephew yesterday, amongst the chaos. (Chrismas morning) Everyone here though it was funny. What do you think?

Cropped and auto c …
I AM smiling!!!! photography picture

Note: In honor of Christmas day, I’m not blogging. Or, maybe I’m just lazy. Either way, here’s something I wrote a while back that seems to fit pretty well into a blog about the mind. Enjoy. And, happy holidays!

Wikihow has a whole page full of smiling instructions, to whit: Begin your smile with your eyes. If you find that every time you try to smile with your mouth, you look like you’re faking it or, worse, like you’re in pain, you may find it useful to look in a mirror and smile only with your eyes. Once your eyes are smiling, they tend to pull your whole face (including your mouth) into a natural, beautiful smile.

Hmm. Good advice, I guess, but I’ve got better. Here’s what you do. Close your eyes. Feel your feet on the ground. Realize that you’re connected to everything else on the surface of the planet by dust and rock and old bone and ancient water, plants long dead, pipes, tunnels, veins of sweet precious ore, the cookie someone dropped.

Breathe the air. Really breathe it. Keep those eyes closed and consider the miracle of breathing. Oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide. Helium, neon, water vapor. The distant scent of a bird. Clouds. Old lady perfume. You’re taking in 15,000 quarts of air every day. Some of us take a little more. Some of us are nice enough to take a little less, just to leave some for everyone else. Those air molecules — they’ve touched those same bits of dust and rock and water upon which you stand. Take them in. Make them part of you. Some day, you can give them back to the ground. Hold them for now. Appreciate the gift for what it is.

Open your eyes. Take a step. Feel all your muscles work. Give thanks to the ground for supporting you. Feel your foot in the air, that same air you breathe. Put it back on the ground. Do it again. Look around and take it all in. What do you see? If you look with the right kind of eyes you can see into the future, or back into the past, because it’s all the same, the same dust and rock and carbon and oxygen and leaves and sky and sun.

What’s NOT miraculous about that? What’s ordinary about being a little machine that takes plants and muscle and a fusion of hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and neon and turns it into another sweet step, foot in the air, foot on the ground, foot in the air… how can that not be the most amazing thing that you could be a part of?

Just for fun, for laughs, for pure appreciation of the complicated crazy once-in-a-million-years quirk of the universe you are, with the sheer force of your will, induce a chemical reaction in your brain to send electrical signals down the infinite hard-traveled miles of your nervous system to constrict some of the muscles of your beautiful face.

Smile.

how far I have come. to call the last 6 months anything but a harsh, heartbreaking struggle would not do it justice. I am nowhere near the end and still no nearer the justice I feel my children and I deserve. that fateful night of 12th June 2009 will be in my mind, my nightmares, my whole being forever. if you’d have told my story to somebody I doubt they would believe you. when you hear or read stories about other peoples lives it’s easy to shrug off the disaster visited upon them and carry on with your own life, never again giving those thirty or so words in the newspaper a thought. until it happens to you. whenever I do relate my story to people I always say “people are locked up for things they didn’t do, for a long time and once you are in prison it is harder to get people to believe you”.  the police and the CPS believed me, but i often think how long would i have been on remand, never mind an actual sentance. sobering stuff.

and now……… see where I am. I have a flat of my own. I see my children every weekend and they tell me how much they want to live with me “ten days with you daddy and four at mommies”. I have people stop me in the street and tell me how they “never believed a word of it”. I even have the satisfaction of knowing that with friends like the ones she has surrounded herself with, you don’t need enemies. all the things that people say about my ex-wife behind her back, I hear. priceless. the harsh reality of total betrayal at the hands of someone I would have sacrificed my life for (cos thats what good husbands do for their families) seems a million miles away. I am proud of myself for surviving.

and now I sit, writing this blog, waiting for the time to arrive (2pm on 25th December) when I go to get my children to spend christmas together with the rest of their family. they will even meet my cousins children for the first time. I have control of my own life and all the responsibilities that go with it. I feel that part of that responsiblity is the pursuit of justice. I will never have closure until I get justice. but for now I thank god for small mercies….. and merry christmas and a happy new year, because mine will be!

Ever hear of this story?

Two people go out. Date #1 (and last). They sit across from each other for two hours, they smile, laugh, make conversation and it all seems pretty fine. But it’s clear to both that they don’t want to see each other again. What happened? The answers will probably be, “It just didn’t feel right,” or, “We just weren’t on the same wave length.” But maybe sometimes more is going on inside. If they were honest about it, there were things about the other person that really bothered them, even angered them, and on the date they decided to just leave well enough alone, smile the smile, part ways and choose never to interact again.

The last time you were on a date and he/she said something that annoyed you, what did you do? If your sister had said that, you wouldn’t hesitate to call her on it, but here you very possibly sit, smiling politely thinking, “Geez, that’s a terrible thing to say,” or, “Omigosh, I can’t believe she just said that.” *smile smile*

You might not even notice you’re doing it because for so many of us it’s so natural to just smile and nod when you’re with a stranger. You wouldn’t want to get all riled up, now would you?

Smile! You're on a date!

Are we too nice and polite on dates? Because I do believe that to a certain extent this stops us from getting to know each other. If they say something that bothers you and you show your frustration or surprise about it, it gives them the opportunity to explain where they’re coming from. You may not marry the person but at least you were open and so you were able to get to know the person a bit better, as they were able to get to know you.

Photo by mattwi1s0n on flickr.

The ultimate indication that I’m having a good day is if I feel like singing in the car (which, thankfully, happens a lot lately).  I never used to do this because I was so afraid of what people would think when they saw me, but now I realize it doesn’t matter.  Who cares if people give me strange looks?  In the grand scheme of things, it will all eventually be forgotten, so why not enjoy the moment?  Sure, people may stare or laugh or give a stern, disapproving look, but it matters not to me, since I can tell I’m obviously having more fun than they are.  I leave them to their road rage and their stressed, rushed driving while I sit back, slow down, and smile to myself.

Singing in the car is, for me, a kind of physical release.  The combination of words and rhyme and cadence mixed with the energy of belting out lyrics while drumming on the steering wheel with my hands is incredibly relieving.  It’s a way for me to expel pent-up tension while also having a moment to enjoy some of my favorite music at whatever volume I choose.  I drive around town, blasting whatever music I feel like playing, singing along with a huge grin on my face, and people look at me like I’m crazy, but I don’t care because I’m having fun.

I know I sing horribly, so I usually keep the windows up to spare people the sound of my voice, but when the weather is nice I enjoy nothing more than a drive through town with all the windows down, loving the heat of summer air, a CD playing, and me singing along.  And since it takes me almost half an hour to get home from the office, that gives me plenty of time to sing and unwind so by the time I get home, all the stress of work is behind me and I can go about my evening feeling relaxed and refreshed.

(Image is a movie still from the 1968 film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, starring Dick Van Dyke)

me dad arrived in newquay on tuesday and visited my flat before we both left for him to book into the Great Western Hotel. his room was ok, with a great view. we went out to eat at La Luna. the food was great. i had the bolognase and he had the carbanara. we both struggled to finish. i had a desert of the home made bread and butter pudding, which was great. he dropped me back at the flat for around 9:30pm. we arranged to link up the next day at aboput 9am. he had drove all the way from birmingham to newquay to bring me back to birmingham to spend Krimbo with my family. i am staying with me mom. i am getting my kids from the ex- in- laws on krimbo day at 2pm. me and me mom are so chuffed. me mom has pulled out all the stops and her house is a bit like santa’s grotto. me kids will love it. i can’t believe that i have them staying with me at Krimbo! my ex, “the Wicked Liar”, had always been in charge of the plans when visiting our relatives in birmingham, which always led to me kids spending virtually all their time with her and her family. i always stayed at me moms, and she at hers. we were married for 11 years. her mom and dad live together. now we are almost totally divorced, the court has made a ruling about the time me kids spend with each parent over Krimbo. i dropped them at the matromonial home (where “the Wicked Liar” lives) on monday afternoon at 2pm after their stay with me. when i dropped them off “the Wicked Liar” was smiling at me from the front door and, to me, that usually means that she is upto no good. i just hope that she has stuck to our agreement! i dont know what to do if she hasn’t? her car isn’t outside the matromonial home, but me mom says she drove past the ex- in- laws at about 1pm today and her car wasn’t there either. she may have been out shopping.

being as our split came more or less out of the blue to me, you would think that all the stress and worry i’ve been put through would have spoilt holidays like Krimbo for me, but i can safely say that it is better than i could have imagined being able to plan things without having to fit them in around her or her family. having me kids with me for these few days at krimbo is the best! definatly worth all the hassle!

i have got all me kids presents, and i have been out for a drink with a old pal of mine who is leaving after krimbo to work on a cruise ship. we had a good time.

the journey to birmingham from newquay was a bit of a nightmare. usually the trip should take around 4 hours, but due to the weather conditions it took about 6- 7 hours. i can’t really grumble- at least i am here.

me mom has agreat PC, which is in my old room. this means i get to use it all night if i want to. i quite miss having it around at my flat. tonight i will be mostly watching Mars Daybreak. i also get to update my blog when i like. when i was living here after the split from me ex, i was doing all sorts of projects on the PC that i never thought i would be able to. i was even half way through designing meself a web page. i did loads with my windows live spaces aswell. i have always wanted to keep some sort of journal and started one many times, but never kept them up. spaces and this blog means that i can keep the journal upto date where ever i am. to be honest i hadn’t put an entry in my live spaces since november, but i did get round to it the other day. if i was trying to keep a paper journal, i think that leaving a gap of a month would have been “a bridge too far”.  

till next time………make mine marvel!

You have heard the old cliché about …”Life isn’t fair, but think of the alternative”?  Well, why don’t you do that today, think of the alternative.  Instead of complaining, think about finding something good in the situation.  Maybe the person you are complaining about is worse off than you are for that moment.  And you might be thinking okay, so what’s in it for me?  Why should I?  Perhaps, just perhaps, you can shift your thinking enough to let in some Light and illuminate what you have been searching for.  Maybe it was right under you nose but you were so busy complaining you couldn’t see it.  Take that “unfair” situation and turn it into a chance to look at things from a different perspective.  Be selfish – and by that I mean do something good for someone else (which may only be not criticizing them for a change) and see how good that makes you feel.  Yes, be selfish, allow yourself to feel good.  People won’t understand why you’re smiling, but you will know!  And it all came about from looking at things from the outside in instead of the inside out; one small change.  And yes, life is as good as you want it to be!

Read more about Kathie at www.TheBaggageHandler.com

You have heard the old cliché about …”Life isn’t fair, but think of the alternative”?
Well, why don’t you do that today? think of alternatives. Instead of complaining, find the good in any situation. Maybe the person you are complaining about is worse off than you are for that moment. You might be thinking okay, so what’s in it for me? Why should I? Perhaps, just perhaps, you can shift your thinking enough to let in some Light and illuminate what you have been searching for. Maybe it was right under you nose but you were so busy complaining you couldn’t see it. Take that “unfair” situation and turn it into an opportunity to look at things from a different perspective. Be selfish – and by that I mean do something good for someone else (which may only be not criticizing them for a change) and see how good that makes you feel. Yes, be selfish, allow yourself to feel good. People won’t understand why you’re smiling, but you will know! And it all came about from looking at things from the outside in instead of the inside out; one small change. And yes, life is as good as you want it to be!

Read more about Kathie at www.TheBaggageHandler.com

The most recent installment in my video blog endeavor. Maybe the attitude of the people around you has more today with what you can do to positively influence them than their geographic location does. Maybe?

Cop15 is about to finish and I am very exited to see where it will end. In general i have been more focused on what have happened outside the Bella Center, than Inside. The social network Twitter has been a great help to keep track of the progress and the chaos… Just now when I am writing this, Tan Copsey from the Green Party in New Zealand tweets that Obama and Wen Jiaboa are making progress. You can follow Tan here. And his link here. Most likely it´s old news when you see it…

One of the most beautiful things I have seen the last two weeks was the demonstration on December 12th. For a very long time it had been announced that this demonstration should be BIG and peaceful. With the one goal: To show the world leaders that the public wants CLIMATE JUSTICE NOW. More than 350 different organizations where participating  and all in all about 100.000 people showed up in front of the Danish parliament, Christiansborg. I was there among the crowd before the speeches started. Walking around and watching all the various cultures, nationalities and creative expressions made me touched. I loved it! People where dancing for climate, hugging for climate, dressed in blue as the ocean or wearing a swimsuit to illustrate that the water level will rise if we don´t ACT NOW. I took some portraits of the lovely climate activists that I met. Some of them will be in the bottom of this post, the rest you can find on my flickr account by clicking Here.

The demonstration started to move from Christiansborg towards the Bella Center. There was music and dancing people all over the place! It was to describe as a Folk Party!! or a carnival. It was all happy times until the very moment where we got stormed by the police. They came from one of the streets on the left. With cars and policemen in battle uniforms, they blocked the road for that part of the demonstration where I was. Luckily I saw them coming and started to take photos of them, and be course of that I managed to pass the chain they made. two minutes slower I too would have been arrested like the 968 other activists. The police say that there was “trouble” with the Black group of people. That they were making vandalism… I saw nothing, I heard nothing and I was there too… Out of the 968 people arrested the police can raise charges against some-what 3 – 10 of them. The rest could go home after 5 hours sitting down on the freezing payment in the cold with handcuffs, and additional 10 hours in the “climate prison”… I can´t understand how that act by the police can be possible! It sounds like something troops are fighting against in Iraq or Tehran…

The worst part this situation is that these 3 – 10 people gets more attention that the remaining 99.980 others peaceful participants in the world media…

Here are some of my photos from the day.

President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, walk from the West Wing to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Dec. 1, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

On a recent trip to a very unusual city called Silver City (Haight Asbury meets Wyoming)… we came upon this sign.In my town (down at the beach) ours just says closed from 10pm to 6am.  Once I met the folks in town…it all became clear

When I was in law school, I competed on a Products Liability moot court team. Our team consisted of three women, and we found ourselves in Cincinnati for the national competition. After winning our first two rounds, we were feeling pretty invincible, and on the third round we argued in front of a new panel of judges who were, in fact, local attorneys and members of the judiciary. They were all men. It was the best arguing we’d done; we were totally “on,” snapping questions from the air and crafting answers that belied our shattered nerves and sweaty palms. The hypothetical case involved a small child killed because faulty parking brakes had released in her family’s driveway and allowed the car to roll backwards and kill her. Whether we were arguing fiercely in favor of the dead child’s family and the fact that auto makers should use higher standards than those required by NHTSA, or switching sides to militate in favor of the fact that “accidents happen” and that cars should not be made so safe that they are not affordable, we were bringing our “A” game.

After the arguments, we were shocked to learn that we had lost the round to a rather lackluster team from Kentucky. One of the reasons, explained by the three  judges, was that we “hadn’t smiled enough.” I have wondered for the past 20 years exactly at what point in discussing a dead child and her horrific death we would have managed to fit in a winning grin, or even a collegial and confident raising of the outer corners of our mouths. I could attribute the whole ridiculousness to the fact that our judges were Southern, and male, and that they just thought girls should ought to smile at them, but I think it’s more complicated than that.  Smiling is (for smilers, anyway) easy social currency; do it and you’re “in,” you’re okay, you’ve given the green light to the world around you. You have “turned the world on with your smile.” Apparently, we were just not giving those men the clear “thumbs up.” (Although I will note, without comment, that the all-male team that beat us did not smile any more than we did, and argued considerably less well).

The fact that someone is not smiling ought not to be accepted as tacit proof of unfriendliness, hostility or danger, particularly in a professional setting. You may have to work a little harder to find out what’s inside of a non-smiler, and I know that it’s harder without that automatic signal waving you in and reassuring you that it’s safe to proceed. If you think about it, though, some, if not all of the best things in life take a little work; we would have no lightbulbs, successfully raised children or shelled walnuts if people quit everything that required them to make an effort and persist when the going got tough.

I have never been a smiler, and although I am more apt to smile these days, it still feels strange unless I am communicating with a small child, an animal, or someone with whom I am extremely comfortable. I have no little crinkles at the outer corners of my eyes, and (I am told that) people often think I am snobby, angry or unhappy until they get to know me. As a child, I did not smile in school pictures, and on at least one occasion my parents’ received a note from an elementary teacher indicating that I “seemed sad,” and asking if “there was a problem at home.” There was no problem at home unless you count the existence of my little brother, and I was not, in fact, sad. I was a happy, well-adjusted child with friends and a loving family who had simply failed to pick up the habit of smiling at appropriate moments. What seems to me to be a personality quirk is apparently seen by the larger community as an indicator of an Affective Disorder worthy of re-orientation therapy. Strangers, from checkout clerks to hospital orderlies feel perfectly comfortable telling me that I should “smile” because “it can’t be that bad,” and although my failure to smile generally doesn’t stem from hostility, that kind of remark turns the tide in the direction of serious ticked-offedness. It is not the business of anyone else whether or not I smile, and for all they know, there is something “that bad,” and I have a damned fine reason for looking grim.

Here’s what I know about smiling. I have always felt sort of glaringly ridiculous and self-conscious when I smile, rather as if I am trying on an entirely other personality and everyone looking at me can see that it’s a bad fit, like someone else’s clothes or a bad dye job. If it comes naturally, as it often does when I am flirting with a baby in the checkout line at the grocery store, it feels natural, and I get in the groove of feeding off the return smile, and smiling even harder. When it’s forced (because I do understand the social cues that should prompt a smile) it takes so much mental effort that I find myself without the ability to speak normally, or think rationally.  I honestly think that my inability to smile has historically made it harder for me to make friends, attract men, and do some of the work I have done in my life, although I have managed to get married and make and keep wonderful friends.  Not everyone, however,  is going to stick around and work to get the sparkling geode of dry wit and loyal friendship out of what appears to be a gray and impenetrable ball of stone. I get that.

I have even read that a study at De Pauw University found that the less people smiled in yearbook photos, the more likely they were to be divorced later in life. It mattered not only that one smiled, but that one smiled “intensely.” Irrationally, my first thought on reading this was to be glad that I had, in fact, smiled for my high school yearbook picture, because the photographer insisted on it. Then I began to wonder if it was intense enough to save my marriage, and whether a fake-y smile was any better than no smile. I needn’t have wasted time on that inquiry; I read on to learn that the “smiling effect” was proven to be valid based on non-yearbook photos, childhood and adult, candid and posed. Failure to smile in all of those other contexts was still linked to the likelihood of divorce, in which case, I’m totally screwed.

I have also read forever that smiling, particularly in women, is viewed by soc-psych types to be part of a pattern of docility and assent in the traditionally dependent “weaker sex,” and that a woman’s refusal to smile, particularly at men, is perceived by them as threatening and as a silent assertion of power. I can guarantee you that at no time during my pathetically dateless high school and college life was I holding back my natural exuberance in order to avoid being dominated by the male of the species. I just really didn’t know how to do it, when to do it, or how to look coy, amused or flirty instead of broadcasting the rictus of death. I know that I was smiled at often, from the time I was born, and I’m thinking that the smiling in our lives must start when we recognize that facial gesture, and that it comes often from the people dearest to our tiny hearts. We must learn to imitate it, to give it back to those we see often, and, eventually, to use it as a way to signal friendliness, affection, openness…all good things. Books are judged by their covers, for better or worse, and, at some point, my book cover apparently changed from “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” to “Bleak House.”

My final observation is that relaxing seems, in my case, to be a predicate to the ability to smile genuinely. As I grow older, more comfortable with myself, and surer of my place in the world, I smile more. I still don’t smile in pictures (for which reason I am braced for the inevitable dissolution of my marriage), and I continue to be incapable of smiling “on command” in any context. I find myself smiling naturally and broadly, though, at children I love, Christmas pageants, all babies, funny stories, friends and sometimes, even, a beloved voice on the phone. I cannot, yet, smile back at strangers in public places; I know that they are “in the right,” socially speaking, but it is as strange to me that they walk around smiling at nothing as it probably is to them that I walk around looking somewhat dyspeptic.

I think my whole life might have been a little easier had I been a smiler.  I can’t claim that unsmilingness is one of my immutable characteristics like being short or having brown eyes, and I could probably have changed it if I had really tried. It hasn’t served me all that well, I won’t fight to defend it, and for me, anyway, it is not a political statement, feminist or otherwise, or a reflection of some personally nihilistic worldview. It’s just the way I turned out.

If I smile at you, though, I really mean it.

Sun always shines down on me. Life is beautiful.

A hater is someone who is jealous and envious and spends all their time trying to make you look small so they can look tall.