Wednesday, May 25, 2005

It All Comes Out in the...Comments

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When I feel that I need to laugh in the middle of the day, I just click on some of my favorite blogs. Some of these bloggers have me bursting out in laughter or silently grinning from ear to ear behind the walls of my work cubby -- oops, I mean office.

There are dynamics at work amongst these bloggers that work wonderfully together.

Do check out the blogs and comments of Treppenwitz, Jack's Shack, PsychoToddler and Doctor Bean and his gang. You will see overlaps throughout these comments and the same familiar names popping up on all of them. One would think that these folks have been pals forever, but that is not the case (except for Doctor Bean and some of his "pallies" -- and wife); they are strangers in a strange land, and have become stranger for the experience. But they're most amusing and it's a breath of fresh air.

Another set of bloggers who are newer to the scene and to my list of faves work equally well in unison/tandem. They are Air Time, Still Wonderin', Just Passin' Through and sometimes OrthoMom. Some of these folks know each other, others pretend to know each other, but they all make beautiful comments together.

Do check out these people for your cheap entertainment.

One of these days, you might even notice me commenting on a blog near you. Just ask around; my puns are better than yours. Na, na, na, na, na, na!

All Roads Lead to Here

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People, I'm brainstorming and I need help. I want to find alternatives for naming streets. So far I've come up with Place, Street, Avenue, Road, Boulevard, Crescent, Court, Gate, Way, Gardens, Circle, Lane.

Do you have any other suggestions? Think of where you live -- anything different to what I mentioned above?

Guard Your Tongue

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I've talked about "lashon harah" before in my posts and how my parents tried to drill it in us to not speak ill of someone and to watch what we say and how we say it.

This morning, I got the following mailing from www.aish.com. It is a pearl of wisdom that is not my own, but one I wish to share with you.


Their tongue is like a sharp arrow (Jeremiah 9:7).


Some people would never physically injure another person. The sight or even the thought of violence makes them cringe. They may not realize that their words can cause more damage than their fists ever could. A physical injury eventually heals and may even be forgotten, but an insulting word can penetrate to the depths of someone's being and continue to reverberate, long after a mere physical wound would have healed.

I have seen this phenomenon in my own practice. Many children are spanked by their parents. Still, with the exception of cases of severe abuse, my patients rarely, if ever, mention the spanking as a trauma. Not so with degrading words. After thirty or more years, patients will remember having been called "stupid," "rotten," or "a no-good bum." A child who was not spanked, but was instead disciplined with shame and made to feel that he or she was a disgrace, is likely to retain that feeling for decades and may harbor an attitude of shame that affects everything that he or she does.

While we are taught to refrain from striking out in anger, we are far less restrained when it comes to verbal lashings. Whether we direct them towards spouses, children, or peers, we should be aware of the impact that words can have. The verse cited above correctly describes the tongue as a sharp, penetrating arrow, which can be every bit as lethal as any physical weapon.

Some people have a wise custom. When they become angry, they clamp their lips tightly. The anger will safely dissipate and the words which could have stung for years never come out.

Today I shall ...
... try to avoid words that may be injurious to another person.

The Ultimate Dinner Party -- Revisited

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I'm not desperate for posts, but I was just reviewing some earlier ones and came across this one from March. It received no comments then. Perhaps today I have some different readers, who are in a different frame of mind, who might want to respond to the call-out...

Back in March this is what I wrote:

If you could host an intimate dinner party with 3-5 others, people from the worlds of music, politics, entertainment, history, etc., and it could be people living or now deceased, who would sit at your table, and what would you serve?

I'm not sure about menus, but I'd love to have one dinner party that hosted Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Jerry Seinfeld. I'm not sure that I'd have to serve anything in fact, because I'd be too busy laughing to eat, and those guys would be too busy keeping me in stitches to care enough about eating. And Jerry? Jerry would talk about NOTHING...but that would be something.

And then I'd like to have a literary dinner party, surrounded by Elie Wiesel, Sholom Aleichem, Anne Frank and perhaps author Judy Blume. Some heady conversations, some personal recollections and some sadness would permeate the room.

And one night I'd like to host a musical-inspired dinner party with Chopin, Ella and Louis and Isaac Stern. What kind of dinner music they would provide, huh? Better make sure the piano is tuned, the violin strings are tightened and water bottles and hankies are available for the vocalists.

So, you fellow bloggers, how about sharing plans for your ultimate dinner party?

*****************

And in the next post, this is what I wrote:


Well, this evening I figured that if I threw this post's scenario/question out to a bunch of strangers, why not pose it to my family!?

My 7 1/2 year old daughter wants to entertain celebrity teens-of-the-hour Lindsay Lohan, Hilary Duff, Raven, and...get this, ALBERT EINSTEIN. She specified that she'd serve Albert "brain food", ie. sushi.

My 5 year old son wants to entertain Spiderman and several other characters from Game Cube games.

My 9 1/2 year old son wants to...just entertain us, it appears, with his dry wit and his sharp observations.

My 40-something-year-old husband wants to host Shammai and Hillel. I told him that guests like these would have to sit at opposite ends of the dinner table because they'd be in disagreement all the time. I guess hubby would have to be the buffer, the deciding factor in the "discussion/debates."

And if any of you would like to come to a bloggers' dinner party at our home, we could arrange that too...!