botan

ah botan...it's been quite awhile since i've had it, but steven came home with some and passed them around. i love the way they melt on your tongue, wrapper and all. such a relic of my childhood...

today was pretty hellacious in the way that only working during the christmas shopping season can really ever be. after a whole day of solving other people's problems i feel kind of numb. but every day has its moments.

one of today's was the kid who was hopping around like a frog. reminds me of the quote, "energy is wasted on the youth". but oh she was cute. i wish i felt like hopping around at 4 in the afternoon on a friday, but alas those days have long since come an' gone.
the other moment of coolness was this woman who came in with a couple of kids. i guess what i admired about her is that she had a really cool parenting style. instead of yelling at them, like most people, she was really interactive, and instead of saying "don't do that!", her technique was getting them to understand why they shouldn't do certain things, and looking at the bigger picture. I especially liked it when she told her son, "you know instead of always wanting everything you see, think about how some people aren't able to have the things they want" which turned into a nice little minilesson on poverty and christmas. She said it in a way that was not condenscending or patronizing and yet entirely age appropriate. i guess she reminded me of jessica sumner, i always liked the way she interacts with her kids...very thoughtful. anyhow the point is, this kind of stuff gives me hope for the future, and counteracts all those times i see people screaming at their kids and even cursing at them...i hate that crap. it makes me sooo mad.

as for me, here's a piece of advice i should really pay attention to, if only i were better at that sort of thing...
"STOP and PAY ATTENTION. For example, how do you react to the alarm clock, traffic, work colleagues and situations, your partner or children? How do you react to anger or fear in someone else? How do you react to your own anger or fear? Become a witness to your own life. Pay attention to how you do things." It's so hard though...I don't know how people do it. Sometimes I wish I was better at retaining information and focusing on the kinds of things that other people seem to have no problem with...after all nobody else seems to have a problem with this except for me. But my question is, how do you know what to pay attention to? Do y'all literally pay attention to everything? Equally? Isn't that exhausting? It sure sounds like it would be, but I don't know...I guess that's the way it's done, but I would imagine it's a lot more stressful dealing with all that incoming data and stimuli. I'm tired of getting yelled at for not remembering shit, and I can't say that I literally choose what to pay attention to. It's more like my brain discards random data on a regular basis that it thinks it doesn't need, and screens out a lot of things that other people probably retain and consider important...
i don't know. it's a challenge area, for sure.

it's days like these i want to follow the good advice of lennie and george and go live off the fat o' the land...life would be much simpler if i could just hole up on a farm somewhere and ride out the days of my winters hunkered up next to a cozy woodstove, knitting away like a madman until springtime...