Lydia Schoch

You are the only person who is in charge of how you feel about yourself. Nobody else can possibly do that. You get to decide if you believe you are beautiful or not, and nobody can take it away from you. If someone suggests that you aren’t beautiful, you can consider how sad it is that they have such a limited view of beauty. You can consider how unfortunate it is that they have such an exaggerated sense of self-importance that they think you should care about what they think. You can also choose to realize that it has nothing at all to do with your beauty and everything to do with their limitations.

–  Ragen Chastain

Last year I shared a list of every novel I’d read in 2013 that wasn’t one of my assignments for the reviewing site I write for under a pseudonym. (This list would be four times bigger if I could tell you about all of those books!)

I thought I’d do the same thing this year. This time I’ll group them by genre.

Science Fiction

Yes, I am aware that the comments on this blog are currently turned off. It is not something I did intentionally, and I am working on getting them turned back on. All of the settings that are related to comments seem to be in order. It’s a mystery, but I’ll update this post once I know what’s going on.

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, comic strips, poems, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Decisions, Decisions. This so true and so funny.

Confessions of a Former Internet Troll. Wow. That’s all I have to say about this. Wow.

Here is Freedom via SylvesterPoetry. The picture matches this poem perfectly.

How I Defeated the Tolkien Estate via Jacopo_della_Q. You don’t have to be a fan of the Lord of the Rings to find this amusing, but I do suspect that people who love J.R.R. Tolkien’s books will be the most amused of all.

From When Is It Ok to Ask a Disabled Person About Their Disability? via jcahdavis:

I couldn’t help but feel an alliance with this child, this child who knows the difference between questions of good intent and questions of cruel intent, because there is a difference. People with disabilities know this difference. We are well versed in reading between the lines and all but feeling the intent of the asker.

From Medicine and Death:

Working in healthcare, you get to experience first-hand and way too often the difference between keeping someone alive and actually saving their life.

Readers, what are you thoughts on this video?

It feels good to be back in my regular schedule of book recommendation again. Over the holidays I sniffed my way through Saving Simon. It’s the true story of what happened to a donkey named Simon after he suffered years of neglect and abuse.  (If these things bother you, stop reading now!)

The guy who wrote this book is the same person who took Simon in when his previous owners were charged with animal abuse. This poor donkey was a in terrible shape. Simon had several infections and many old, poorly-healed wounds. He was also extremely underweight and malnourished.

Seeing him recover from this physically and emotionally brought tears to my eyes. While I’m not normally the kind of person who likes such sentimental things, this was a beautifully written story.

What have you been reading?

This post was originally shared on March 31, 2014. I will be back in early January with new material.

Photo by Alan Levine.

One of the more interesting discussions that’s been happening on Twitter recently has circled around this question.

Many of the writers and bloggers I follow say controversial subject matter should be kept private because bringing them up has a high probability of alienating potential readers. I understand their concerns, but there are some very good reasons for mentioning these things when it’s appropriate to do so.

Reason #1

It humanizes you. I follow an incredibly wide range of people online, many of whom I strongly disagree with when it comes to politics, religion, or the proper toppings for a pizza. If you gathered them all into the same room, the only things they’d have in common are a shared love of reading and  kind, intelligent personalities.

Yet I like our differences. It’s fascinating to see how two people can believe completely different things and still arrive at the same conclusion or believe the same basic principle but interpret it in opposite ways. What’s even more interesting is to see how strongly the religion, culture, and country you grew up in shape the person you become as an adult. Not everyone responds to similar circumstances in the same way.

Of course there are times and places when it’s completely inappropriate to bring these things up, but honesty is valuable. You can

Reason #2

Some stories require it. Last year I read a young adult novel written by someone who very quietly interjected a lot of symbols and memes from her religion into the plot. The characters were specifically described as people who had grown up with no religious instruction at all, yet they kept saying and doing things that were obviously pulled from this tradition.

Ordinarily I’d have no problem with this. A few of my favourite books were written by people whose were clearly heavily influenced by their faith, but I don’t like being surprised by ideology regardless of whether or not I agree with it.

The sneakiness of this particular novel bothered me even more because it was marketed in a way that completely overlooked its religious undertones.  Had I known what to expect from the beginning I would have enjoyed the second half of it a lot more.

Reason #3

via J.J

The rest of us will (probably) figure it out anyway. It’s extremely difficult to write anything without injecting your values into it somewhere. I’ve read a handful of authors who successfully created well-rounded, believable characters whose beliefs shared little to nothing in common with their creators, but this is a rare talent.

Most of the time story-tellers leave an imprint of their worldview somewhere in the plot. Despite the awesome archetypal villain on your right, this isn’t a bad thing. Your religious beliefs (or lack thereof) and political affiliations are influenced by your experiences, personality, and background.

The choices you’ve made regarding them provide important fodder for past, present, and future stories, and I believe you can acknowledge that without casting judgement on the lives of people who don’t see the world the same way.

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, comic strips (click to enlarge it!),  poems, songs, short stories, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Bomomo. This is my kind of art.

The Garden of Love. The lyrics are printed in this link as well. I’d recommend checking them out even if you’re not interested in listening to the entire song. They’re incredibly vivid.

From Henrietta’s Garden:

It started at her dad’s funeral. Her brother gave his eulogy about what a great dad he was and how he took them out for soccer on Sundays, and Henrietta wept a single tear that was not a tear but a daisy petal.

The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered. The last line is the best one.

Unfinished Business: The Right to Play. A short film about what people who are incarcerated  do with their free time and dream about. It’s really interesting.

The Secret World of the Dunkin’ Donuts Franchise Kings. What caught my attention in this article was how these businessmen treated their families. You can be amazingly successful in one area of life but fail dismally in another.

I’ll have more book recommendations for you in January. What have you been reading over the holidays?

This post originally went live on May 5, 2014. I will return to my regular blogging schedule in the new year. 

Someone I follow on Twitter who prefers to remain anonymous recently asked something interesting:

Do you have any decidedly unacceptable thoughts or wants?

The question was posed to everyone, but I thought I’d respond to it with a full length blog post.

My answer is yes. Everyone has thoughts that they’d rather keep to themselves sometimes, whether it’s to silently express frustration with a person, place, or situation. It isn’t humanely possible to always give the benefit of the doubt or remain cheerful indefinitely.

Photo by DodosD.

This use of the term “unacceptable” is assuming, of course, that even our thoughts must be censored to fit someone else’s idea of what we should be feeling.

You can think something without agreeing with it.

You can think something and have mixed feelings about it.

You can think something but never say it out loud.

Even if it’s grouchy. Spiteful. Truthy.

I don’t believe in thoughtcrimes. There’s a world of difference between entertaining an idea and actually saying, writing, or doing whatever it was that flitted through your brain.

If anything, the act of uprooting those thoughts  tends to encourage them to stick around longer.

Hold them gently in the palm of your hand. Acknowledge that they exist, but don’t feel guilty over something that hasn’t actually caused any harm. Allowing them to softly dissipate is the best thing I’ve learned yet from my meditation habit.

This post was originally published on April 21, 2014. I will be back with new material in the first week of January.

How is it that though I love advice, I so seldom listen to it?

— C.G.Ayling (@CGAyling) April 18, 2014

A fascinating conversation on this topic sprung up on Twitter over the weekend. It seems to be much easier to give other people advice than to receive it. Why is that?

I think there are several reasons why this might be so.

 Talk Is Cheap. It’s always going to be easier to tell someone else how to live than to get into those habits ourselves. I also suspect that talking about something that is good for you makes some people feel like they’re taking a step in the right direction. If they can discuss it, maybe they’ll also be able to convince themselves to finally do it regularly.

Being Right Feels Great. It takes a humble person to admit when he or she is wrong, but it takes an even more humble person to resist the urge to make a big deal about it when they’re proven right.

We Think It’s Helpful. Whether or not this is true varies widely from one situation to the next. I honestly do believe that most people have good intentions most of the time, though.

We’ve Made the Same Mistakes. Some people seem to have a very difficult time allowing others the same freedoms they enjoyed when they were younger. This isn’t always a bad thing, of course, but there is a big difference between sharing what you’ve learned the hard way and trying to control the lives of other adults.

Readers, what do you think? Have I missed anything?

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, comic strips, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Six Christmases. A fascinating look at how life can change one Christmas at a time.

The Mischievous Mommy. It’s rare for me to recommend an entire blog, but I couldn’t pick just one of these paintings. The owner of this blog transforms her toddler’s pictures into  artworks that have to be seen to be believed.

Greetings from Pandora. Where does she come from? What does she want? There are so many story possibilities in her eyes.

Grandmothers Everywhere Prepare To Guilt Their Grandchildren To Jesus This Holiday Season. Too funny.

Survive the Holidays with Social Anxiety. This is great for anyone who has ever been nervous in a social setting for any reason.

This short film is great:

Let’s see how many holiday greetings I can fit into the end of this post. Happy/ Merry:

• Festivus
• Yule
• Christmas
•  Hannukah
• (early) Mawlid Un Nabi
• Malanka
• Pancha Ganapati
• Saturnalia
• New Year

If I missed yours, let me know in the comments. I tried pretty hard to find everything that’s celebrated this time of year. It was a very interesting search!