When you live in a city as exciting as New York, there is always somewhere to go. Normally when you’re trying to go from point a to point b, the only thing stopping you from getting there in a timely manner is the distance — and if you’re driving, the possibility of traffic.
There are those alive in the world that seek to find personal insult in any utterance and a deep wounding in every gesture or glance. Those brittle people only feel better in playing the system to punish those that they believe have punctured them.
Continue reading → You Look Smart: Bending Compliments for Political Gain
With each breaking day, the culture of our world community is cracking into crassness and the memes of delivery for that debasing of human nature lives in the tubes of the internets. When you see the — now infamous — image of the boy below, do you laugh or cringe?
Too often we are forced to do work that only sustains us and does not win out wants. How we combine the work into winning is the complex conundrum that fascinates few and frustrates many.
Five years ago, Father’s Day fell on June 15th as it does this year. What better time to write a few more words about my father? Also, some of my thoughts on our President’s writing regarding this day.
Great Advice
Both of my parents have given me great advice and continue to do so. Some of the best advice I have gotten in my life has come from my parents – I suppose that is the way things are meant to be in an ideal world. I know only too well what happens when there is an absent parent as I spent hundreds of hours tutoring children who all had either one or both parents missing, in jail, or dead. They were strongly affected, and never in a good way.
A child without any sort of role model in the home will seek out role models elsewhere; whether those role models are found on the screen of the television, the movie theater, or the music device of their choosing, the role model is consistently there for them and they learn from them, for better or worse.
My father once gave me a shortly worded yet strong reprimand for something that happened when I was working in a retail environment. A customer was less than pleased with the help I had given them and told me as much. My father simply stated that even being complimented one thousand times by your customer did not make up for the one time you mess up and make them unhappy; it is unfortunate but true that people will more likely fill out a customer comment card when they are unhappy with the service than when they are quite happy with the service.
It turned out to be quite true because I was later asked about the incident by people who were higher up at the store. While the particular incident didn’t really get me in trouble because it was down to the person mishearing what I had said and deciding that I was clearly an evildoer who was out to make their lives miserable, it could have been much worse had the higher ups been even a little less understanding.
Continue reading → A Day for Fathers 2008
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