Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Need a release? Just go shooting!

HA! I know what you were thinking! ;P

I recently purchased a Canon Rebel XSI, and I have found my niche in photography. It just makes me happy and relaxed to go out and shoot. It actually is helping to generate a interest in exploring Hays further. Occasionally, you will see some of my favorite or most interesting shots here.

Haircut

Isn’t it amazing how a new, bold haircut can make you feel like a new person? I just love that feeling.

The Wedding Night

I have started noticing an interesting trend lately. The wedding night seemingly no longer holds the sacred status, I imagine, it once did. Many couples are more interested in drinking or hanging out with friends than getting down to business. I refer not to hanging out 1 a.m. but to 4 or 5 a.m. What is the reason for this shift? Does it relate to the fact that sex before marriage and living together is much more commonly accepted than decades ago? My gut tells me this is a large part of the reason. Does it have something to do with the changing image of marriage? Again, my instinct is also ringing some bells on this one as well. Still, I think personally it wouldn’t matter to me. The wedding day is a major milestone in your life. For women, we can gain a new name. Legally, we have tied our name to another person’s name (and credit). This is a day that for many people has been worked and looked forwards too for a long period of time. For good or bad, your husband/wife just made a big commitment to you. (Hopefully, they intend to keep it.) I am somewhat traditional. The wedding night always seemed like a two person event, not a big party, at least not after 1or 2 a.m. I don’t have all the answers. It just seems to be a marked change in societal behavior that should be noted.

Strength and Leadership

I have been pondering the nature of strength and leadership for the last few days. What is the appearance of strength? It can be bold and forceful. It occurs to me that the true picture of strength is not so loud. I imagine strength is more of a quiet assurance that has the core of the firmness of steel covered with the softened edges of velvet. True strength stems from a rock solid belief that you are exactly correct or on the right path for your place in life. It isn’t afraid of opposing views or a change in your views, beliefs or path. Strength is not being afraid of yourself, others or living. It is the courage with which we face the unknown and unknowable and move forward regardless. It is a compelling, driving combinaton of fear and anticipation to face the cliff-like future with faith and just jump. This brings me to leadership. I believe that true leadership has a core of true strength. Leadership doesn’t always look like a bright beacon shining that we are compelled to follow, nor does it always look like the outstreched hand urging us to go forward. Leadership has many outward appearances. At the heart of brilliant leadership, I believe you will find a heart turned towards outward other people, ears that are listening and a mouth that is closed. When leaders speaks, their people listen. The power that a leaders’ words and actions hold is immeasurable. They considers the truth before they speaks. Their words are dedicated to lifting up, not tearing down. They are more concerned with giving than taking. The weight of responsibility is their mantle and they wear it with joy and acceptance.

Love and Other Random Thoughts

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
Jeanne Moreau

Let the fear of danger be a spur to prevent it; he that fears not, gives advantage to the danger.
Francis Quarles

If you would stand well with a great mind, leave him with a favorable impression of yourself; if with a little mind, leave him with a favorable impression of himself.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

An affirmation is a strong, positive statement that something is already so.
Shakti Gawain

Someone’s boring me. I think it’s me.
Dylan Thomas, in Rayner Heppenstall, Four Absentees (1960)

You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.
Robert Frost

Independence

Everybody likes to go their own way–to choose their own time and manner of devotion.
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

Talent

If you have a talent, use it in every which way possible. Don’t hoard it. Don’t dole it out like a miser. Spend it lavishly like a millionaire intent on going broke.
Brendan Francis

True Beauty

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Anger

Anger is a signal, and one worth listening to.
Harriet Lerner, The Dance of Anger, 1985

Self Interest

If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.
Arthur Schopenhauer

It is our responsibilities, not ourselves, that we should take seriously.
Peter Ustinov

Politics

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.
Abraham Lincoln

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Sexy vs. Plain

So we all know which is going to win the age old dispute, sexy vs plain. I happened to find this particular video interesting.
http://video.aol.com/video/sexy-vs-plain/2203828

Looking Forward

To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else.
Burnadette Devlin, The Price of My Soul, 1969

Winning is important to me, but what brings me real joy is the experience of being fully engaged in whatever I’m doing.
Phil Jackson

The greatest danger to our future is apathy.
Jane Goodall

Random Mix of Quotes

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.

Mahatma Gandhi

The things that make us safest from others make us least from ourselves.
Danah Boyd, apophenia, 01-08-07

Temptation rarely comes in working hours. It is in their leisure time that men are made or marred.
W. N. Taylor

I’ve been on a diet for two weeks and all I’ve lost is two weeks.
Totie Fields

She had an unequalled gift… of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.
Henry James

There are two kinds of people, those who finish what they start and so on.
Robert Byrne

Two paradoxes are better than one; they may even suggest a solution.
Edward Teller

No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.
Michel de Montaigne

It is only the first step that is difficult.
Marie De Vichy-Chaconne, Marquise Du Defend, letter to Defend, 1763

Perfect as the wing of a bird may be, it will never enable the bird to fly if unsupported by the air. Facts are the air of science. Without them a man of science can never rise.
Ivan Pavlov

Trouble is part of your life, and if you don’t share it, you don’t give the person who loves you a chance to love you enough.
Dinah Shore

The most profound statements are often said in silence.
Lynn Johnston, For Better or For Worse, 01-15-04

Shut out all of your past except that which will help you weather your tomorrows.
Sir William Osler

It is better to look ahead and prepare than to look back and regret.
Jackie Joyner-Kersee

How can you come to know yourself? Never by thinking, always by doing. Try to do your duty, and you’ll know right away what you amount to.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Words are a heavy thing…they weigh you down. If birds talked, they couldn’t fly.
Sy Rosen and Christian Williams, Northern Exposure, On Your Own, 1992

Often we can achieve an even better result when we stumble yet are willing to start over, when we don’t give up after a mistake, when something doesn’t come easily but we throw ourselves into trying,when we’re not afraid to appear less than perfectly polished.
Sharon Salzberg, O Magazine, The Power of Intention, January 2004

When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.
Betty Friedan

The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart.
Saint Jerome

In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior.
Sir Francis Bacon

Assumptions are the termites of relationships.
Henry Winkler

There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power.
Washington Irving

What if this weren’t a hypothetical question?
Unknown

Men who never get carried away should be.
Malcolm Forbes

Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.
Audre Lorde

It is pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed.
Kin Hubbard

Anything you could ever want or be you already have and are.
David Russell, I Heart Huckabee’s

No matter how far you travel or how much you run from it, can you ever really escape your past?
Becky Hartman Edwards and Michael Patrick King, Sex and the City,
Escape from New York, 2000

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time… The wait is simply too long.
Leonard Bernstein

Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble
to acquire it.
Samuel Johnson, quoted in Boswell’s Life of Johnson

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
Bill Gates, Business @ The Speed of Thought

You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.
Zig Ziglar, “Secrets of Closing the Sale”, 1984

Even with the best of maps and instruments, we can never fully chart our journeys.
Gail Pool

Letting your customers set your standards is a dangerous game, because the race to the bottom is pretty easy to win. Setting your own standards–and living up to them–is a better way to profit. Not to mention a better way to make your day worth all the effort you put
into it.
Seth Godin, Seth Godin’s Blog, 07-28-06

Zoo: An excellent place to study the habits of human beings.
Evan Esar, Esar’s Comic Dictionary

The time to stop talking is when the other person nods his head affirmatively but says nothing.
Henry S. Haskins

Think of life as a terminal illness, because, if you do, you will live it with joy and passion, as it ought to be lived.
Anna Quindlen, A Short Guide to a Happy Life, 2000

I quit therapy because my analyst was trying to help me behind my back.
Richard Lewis

Love all, trust a few. Do wrong to none.
William Shakespeare, “All’s Well That Ends Well”, Act 1 Scene 1

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.
Adlai E. Stevenson Jr., speech to Democratic National Convention,
Chicago, Illinois, July 21, 1952

Nobody will believe in you unless you believe in yourself.
Liberace

Challenges are gifts that force us to search for a new center of gravity. Don’t fight them. Just find a different way to stand.
Oprah Winfrey, O Magazine, October 2002

Never fear the want of business. A man who qualifies himself well for his calling, never fails of employment.
Thomas Jefferson

Hate no one; hate their vices, not themselves.
J. G. C. Brainard

Stubbornness is also determination. It’s simply a matter of shifting from “won’t power” to “will power.”
Peter McWilliams, Life 101

All of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon - instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.
Dale Carnegie

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, in Irving Good, The Scientist Speculates (1962)

Every man serves a useful purpose: A miser, for example, makes a wonderful ancestor.
Laurence J. Peter

Start every day off with a smile and get it over with.
W. C. Fields

A book of quotations . . . can never be complete.
Robert M. Hamilton

Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets and then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again.
Rick Polito, Marin Independent Journal’s TV listing for
“The Wizard of Oz”

Traditions are group efforts to keep the unexpected from happening.
Barbara Tober

May your walls know joy; May every room hold laughter and every window open to great possibility.
Maryanne Radmacher-Hershey, 1995

The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for.
Oscar Wilde

The way we see the problem is the problem.
Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

See things as they are and write about them. Don’t waste your creative energy trying to make things up. Even if you are writing fiction, write the things you see and know.
Real Live Preacher, Real Live Preacher weblog, 07-25-06

When everyone is somebody, then no one’s anybody.
W. S. Gilbert

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
George Santayana

The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection.
Bertrand Russell

When you feel in your gut what you are and then dynamically pursue it - don’t back down and don’t give up - then you’re going to mystify a lot of folks.
Bob Dylan

Anyone can be an idealist. Anyone can be a cynic. The hard part lies somewhere in the middle i.e. being human.
Hugh Macleod, How To Be Creative: 29, 08-22-04

My Father taught me how to be a man – and not by instilling in me a sense of machismo or an agenda of dominance. He taught me that a real man doesn’t take, he gives; he doesn’t use force, he uses logic; doesn’t play the role of trouble-maker, but rather, trouble-shooter; and most importantly, a real man is defined by what’s in his heart, not his pants.
Kevin Smith, My Boring Ass Life, 06-01-05

There’s no praise to beat the sort you can put in your pocket.
Moliere

Politeness and consideration for others is like investing pennies and getting dollars back.
Thomas Sowell, Creators Syndicate

I have witnessed the softening of the hardest of hearts by a simple smile.
Goldie Hawn

Don’t get yourself arrested and make your day worse! If you need to vent, just smash something that’s already broken! You can’t get in trouble for wrecking the unsalvageable!
R. Stevens, Diesel Sweeties, 11-06-06

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way… you become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.
Aristotle

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.
Erica Jong

A loud voice cannot compete with a clear voice, even if it’s a whisper.
Barry Neil Kaufman

Such is the inconsistency of real love, that it is always awake to suspicion, however unreasonable; always requiring new assurances from the object of its interest.
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1764

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Journal writing is a voyage to the interior.
Christina Baldwin

If your head is wax, don’t walk in the sun.
Benjamin Franklin

You’ve got to make a conscious choice every day to shed the old - whatever ‘the old’ means for you.
Sarah Ban Breathnach

Pain makes man think. Thought makes man wise. Wisdom makes life endurable.
John Patrick

Computer dating is fine, if you’re a computer.
Rita Mae Brown

A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.
Joseph Stalin

In the end, everything is a gag.
Charlie Chaplin

My theory is that if you look confident you can pull off anything - even if you have no clue what you’re doing.
Jessica Alba

Achievement is largely the product of steadily raising one’s levels of aspiration and expectation.
Jack Nicklaus, ‘My Story’

Reveal not every secret you have to a friend, for how can you tell but that friend may hereafter become an enemy. And bring not all mischief you are able to upon an enemy, for he may one day become your friend.
Saadi

If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much.
Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense

We can only learn to love by loving.
Iris Murdoch, O Magazine, February 2004

Resolute

Resolute is a great word. It contains a power and strength that is striking.

The dictionary defines it as:

[rez-uh-loot] adjective

1. firm in purpose or belief; characterized by firmness and determination;

2. characterized by quickness and firmness

1. Having a decided purpose; determined; resolved; fixed in a determination; hence, bold; firm; steady.

2. Convinced; satisfied; sure. [Obs.]

3. Resolving, or explaining; as, the Resolute Doctor Durand. [Obs.]

Doing what one has decided to do, in spite of opposition, criticism etc.