Tag Archives: Sleeping with Bread

Getting myself connected

Posted on February 26, 2010 by | 5 Comments

Cutting right to the chase for this week’s Sleeping with Bread/Flashback Friday post:

For what am I least grateful this past week?

My attitude earlier in the week in that I was feeling that I was spinning my wheels, and so not to focus so much on the negative as I did then, I’ll go right to the next question:

For what am I most grateful this past week?

Connecting with people both online and IRL (in real life), including:

  • fellow Catholics IRL, as our church had a parish renewal workshop this past Wednesday.
  • fellow Catholics online, such as Jennifer, aka The Literate Housewife, and Rebecca, aka TheBookLady. oops, I mean Cathy Lees of okie-booklady. I already talked about Jennifer earlier this week, but Rebecca Cathy connected with me on GoodReads yesterday, asking my opinion about favorite Catholic  books. (Rebecca was kind enough to send me a direct message via Twitter this morning, Feb. 27, to let me know of my mistake, Cathy goes by Booklady on GoodReads and I made the jump to the wrong conclusion; my apologies to both ladies, but both have blogs worth following).
  • Protestants online and off, especially Tara Lamont Eastman, whom I met through Sleeping with Bread, and other parishioners from First Lutheran Church of Jamestown, N.Y., who are participating in an online discussion centered around the book Holy Conversations.
  • Muslims, especially Jaffer Maniar, who has commented here a few times and on my other blog, Unfinished Rambler.
  • Atheists, agnostics and the like, especially Chris Cameron who has the blog Angry Seafood, which I highlighted for the past month over at my blog Unfinished Rambler (here is why).

So what are you least grateful for/most grateful for this past week?

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Posted in Flashback Friday, Soul

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Lack of Motivation Monday, but I’m still alive

Posted on February 22, 2010 by | 2 Comments

When I began this blog, I had the intent of merging all my other blogs into this one, and then focus on three aspects of this unfinished person on the following days (with rambling posts interspersed in between):

  1. Body: Motivation Monday — where I would share a quote from the late George Sheehan to help motivate you in your exercise for the week and hopefully to motivate me also.
  2. Mind: Midweek Review (Wednesday)– where I would share with you a review of what I’ve been reading the past week.
  3. Soul: Flashback Friday — where I would share a look back at my week in terms of The Examen of St. Ignatius of Loyola, framed in the questions of “For what am I most grateful this week?” and “For what am I least grateful this week?” as the group above does each week.

As you can tell, by now, I haven’t kept to that, and so today, in keeping with (and straying from) that original Monday theme, I’m going to talk about “Lack of Motivation Monday” without a quote from George Sheehan and combine it with Midweek Review and Flashback Friday.

For what am I least grateful this past week, this past month, these past two months?

Lack of motivation: Let me count  just a few of the ways I have been unmotivated in no particular order. One, I signed up for an event called the Iditawalk, where I committed to walking 30 minutes a day through February into March to help me slowly but surely get back to running, and I think I only have done it once. Two, I am a member of WeightWatchers.com, but haven’t kept to the plan. Three, I got a gym membership at the beginning of the year, just for three months. Now it’s almost the end of the second month, and I only have gone maybe once. Four, I only have read two books so far this year. Five, I was accepted into an online writing site that pays a minimal amount per article, but still it’s something, and only have written two articles for it. Six, I still usually only make it through Morning Prayer in praying the Liturgy of the Hours and often don’t pray what is considered the second part of the hinge: Evening Prayer. Seven, and something that pales in comparison to the other things listed here, I have yet to merge my previous blogs and entries there into this blog.

I’m going to be honest and tell you I don’t know for what am I most grateful this past week, this past month, these past two months. I guess if anything, it’s as the song “Alive” from Pearl Jam says, “I’m still alive” with the same potential of what once was considered a curse instead becoming a blessing.

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Posted in Body, Flashback Friday, Midweek Review, Mind, Motivation Monday, Music, Soul

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Where is your balm this week?

Posted on February 8, 2010 by | 1 Comment

For this week’s Sleeping With Bread post (click on the badge at right for more information about the meme), this week’s host Lamont phrased the questions: “What are the things that caused you to feel ‘chapped’ this week? What are the lip balm – Gilead – moments that cooled, refreshed and healed?” She used those instead of the customary ones such as “For what am I most grateful? Least grateful?,” “When did I give and receive the most love? The least love?,” or “When did I feel most alive? Most drained of life?” and so on that we who participate in the meme often use.

Chapped?

For today’s post, I’m going to hearken back to this post where I put things into focus through the prisms of body, mind and soul, the theme of this blogs, so in terms of things that caused me to feel chapped:

1. Physically: Lack of exercise. Much like in that post, I’m still struggling to get myself out the door to exercise, even though I joined the Idita-Walk 2010, which involves walking 30 minutes a day for 35 days from Feb. 1 to March 31 for a total of 1,049 minutes.

2. Mentally: Lack of reading discipline. I’ve been in a reading slump since at least December, having only read one book: Murder at the Super Bowl by Fran Tarkenton with Herb Resnicow, and then I kept on a Super Bowl theme and tried to read Black Sunday by Thomas Harris. It didn’t hold my interest and I’ve decided to follow the example of a few book bloggers that I follow, who are doing something called “deliberate reading,” which is only reading what they want to read.

To that end, earlier this month I started reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses as translated by Mary Innes as part of the Really Old Classics Challenge (click on button to go to challenge’s main page). Along with that, I’m going to continue participating in the Agatha Christie Reading Challenge and want to pick up the Ladies Detective Agency series again by Alexander McCall Smith.

Beyond that, I have no plans, other than to continue to try to read books that already are on our shelves. However, since I started working at a library part-time in December, that is getting to be more and more difficult than it sounds. The only thing I’ve been doing to try to stop the tide from overflowing the house is to keep a list of books I find while shelf-reading instead of just grabbing them from the shelves and taking them out immediately.

3. Spiritually: Lack of spiritual discipline, primarily missing Mass this past weekend because, in a rare moment of honesty here, I was out late Saturday night getting drunk at a firemen’s banquet with my wife. Do I regret getting drunk? As a Catholic, of course, I have to say no (said in half-jest). However, I do regret missing Mass (said in all seriousness).

And those moments that cooled, refreshed and healed me (a lot shorter than the things that caused me to feel chapped):

1. Physically: Walking to work at library. I can say that it definitely has been cooling this winter.

2. Mentally: Hanging out with friends for the Super Bowl. The commercials were horrible; the halftime show, meh; the food, very good, but the fellowship, even better than all the previous.

3. Spiritually: Joining the aforementioned Tara with a group (online) from her church in reading and discussing Holy Conversations: Talking About God In Everyday Life by Richard Peace. I will have a post tomorrow that will go along with this.

I’ll end with this clip from Napoleon Dynamite, since that is where Tara got her inspiration for the wording of this week’s questions (with which I also leave you):

What are the things that caused you to feel “chapped” this week? What are the lip balm – Gilead – moments that cooled, refreshed and healed?

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Posted in Body, Flashback Friday, Mind, Soul

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What is the measure of your success?

Posted on January 27, 2010 by | 1 Comment

For this week’s Sleeping With Bread post (click on the badge at right for more information about the meme), this week’s host Lamont had phrased the questions: “What turned your lights on?” and “What turned your lights off?” instead of the customary ones such as “For what am I most grateful? Least grateful?,” “When did I give and receive the most love? The least love?,” or “When did I feel most alive? Most drained of life?” and so on that we often use.

For me, how to phrase the questions this week isn’t happening as I want to reflect on a different question:

What Is The Measure of Your Success?

I awoke this morning with the song “What is the measure of your success?” by Steve Taylor (push the play button on right side of page to hear the song, sorry my blog posts are interactive). It then got me to thinking about my recent receiving of my W-2 and 1099 for last year. While I won’t share the amounts, out of the opposite of vanity whose proper antonym I can’t find in the thesaurus to describe, I will say this, in temporal terms, it is a pittance, or what many would consider a pitiful sum.

Not to be flippant, but the measure of my success obviously isn’t money. So what is it? How do I measure it? If it’s not money, how do you measure it? It’s easy to say that “in the end, the love you take/ is equal to the love you make,” but actually to attempt to put that into practice is quite another matter. Am I doing that? Am I working on the love I make or, to word it in another less humanistic way, am I spreading the love with which God has graced me?

I like to hope so, in the small ways –

by sharing not only a smile, but also a connection about the book or movie they’re taking out, with the patrons when I work behind the counter at the library.

by carrying out one of my late grandfather’s mannerisms of actually talking with the checkout people and trying to connect with them.

by letting “people in power” (in this case, limited power as with a school district or a borough, but power nonetheless) know when I talk to them for a story for the paper that I understand, or at least, attempt to understand, the bureaucratic and legislative hoops through which they have to jump every day. I should add that I honestly don’t do this out of a need to get a quote or “get the story.” It’s just a small way to let them know I know where they’re coming from (and I know I’m still not wording this right, but the thesaurus doesn’t cover the various nuances in this wasteland between meaning and non-meaning).

I could go on and on with the “bys,” but before I sound too vain (you probably think this post is about me), I’ll stop and say that I’m not always spreading love, that sometimes I, yes, even I, as hard as it may to believe, spread dissent and even hatred with the words I speak and the actions I take.

Lest I spread more dissent and hatred than I already have, I won’t repeat them here (plus out of vainglory, truth be told).

Just as I don’t seem to have the proper words for this post today, I also don’t seem to have the proper ending for this post.

So I’ll just leave you with the question, “What is the measure of your success?” one more time as asked by Steve Taylor, this time from YouTube:

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Posted in Soul

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