Child’s Ordeal Shows Risks of Psychosis Drugs for Young

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/business/02kids.html?_r=2&hp

Digging Up Dead Friends

As we drove past a cemetery my Kindergartner said, "There are a lot of dead people." Then he asked about if they can come back, I can't remember what we answered, if we said something about heaven or not, but then he said, "I want to dig up my friend 'Jack' because I want to talk to him because he was nice."
We told him he could talk to him in his head. When he did not seem convinced we then said he could pray and have God let Jack hear his message to him.

Eight Minutes, Do Less Better

If one tries to accomplish more than one CAN accomplish, one accomplishes very little.

If we have a never ending list of things we need to do, where every one accomplishment or task completed is normally replaced by two new deeds to be done, then we are never finished, and never at peace. Somethings have to be done on a regular basis, somethings can be put off, and others have to be completed right now.

What absolutely needs to be done is to eliminate things that we only perceive we need to do, and that we really do not gain anything positive from participating in. Things that just are distractions, mindless activities or things to build up our ego.

Prioritize, plan on completing a reasonable number of tasks, again not what one wishes they could accomplish in the allotted time, or what one's more efficient sibling or friend from college could accomplish, but what you can, by using your past history as a basis, and plan accordingly.

View from the Neighbor's Deck

I am trying to get back into meditation, increasing the length by one minute each day, today I did eight minutes in the back section of my side yard, which is next to and behind my detached garage, cornered by a tall wood fence on two sides, with a row of some sort of tall thin pine trees that block it off from the rest of the side yard and make it virtually "un-visable" from the street. I am letting some very young trees grow along the fence to block the view of my neighbors.

Unfortunately a section of the fence collapsed in some extremely windy weather we've had this week, so I have a clear view of my back neighbor's deck and glass sliding doors, so I could not stand directly in middle of this basically outside room where I wanted to meditate unless I wanted people looking up from their cereal and pondering why this freak is standing motionless looking into our house. So I moved a few steps to the left to be out of their view. I would be alone with the sound of the wind, squirrels, cats, leaf blowers, tree trimmers, cars, birds and my thoughts so long as my next door neighbor wasn't hanging out on their back deck, which at this hour seemed unlikely. Six and a half minutes into my eight minute standing meditation I hear the sounds of someone on the deck, going back and forth a few times. Fuck it I am not stopping early to make some one who does not give a damn and me and my piece of mind feel more comfortable about the sanity of their next door neighbor. Ah, well, maybe they are familiar with standing meditation or wall gazing, or maybe they are not.

The point of this is that to keep my self on track I am going to blog the length of my meditation and the main concept that my mind decided to decode on ponder.

Good Taste

The other day I was playing the newest Fall album in the car and at some point my eight year-old son said, "Dad," which is usually how he starts off when he is going to complain about my music, "This music is awesome." It is cool bonding over music with my kids, though my big guy some times complains that no kids in his school really know music like he does so he does not have anyone to talk to about it but me. I tell him his classmates will eventually catch up to him a bit by middle school.

SCHOOL PICTURES, THE REMIX

My kids school pictures did not come out too great. I felt like, life is not perfect and this is a representation of it, my 8 year-old is entering that awkward stage and sometimes does not look like the perfect little boy he use to, and he is growing his hair long again and it is now in an in-between stage, that's life. My little guy had a weird smile in his picture.

I had talked to the boys about their pictures how they were not perfect, but that it did not matter, and I pointed out some of the positive things about the pictures. They eventually came around and no longer

My wife was really unhappy with the pictures, so when we received an email about retakes she wanted to have them redone. I did not really care about it, but worried that it would send a mixed message to the kids because I had recently spent time getting them to be okay with the imperfect pictures.

Fast forward to this morning, picture retake day, basically the boys were neurotic basket cases worrying about their smiles for their pictures, and spent all morning trying on various smile faces, sometimes laughing at themselves and each other, sometime confused as to why this particular smile made them look more insane than happy (I never couched it this way though, I would say, that's not the best I've seen you make, less/more teeth depending on the smile).

So we wind up being late for school, I get home turn on the computer to blog this entry, then I get a phone call from school, my oldest son forgot to put the envelope with the money for the retake in his back pack. I find the envelope and adding to the confusion realized that my kindergartner had the 3rd grader's envelope, which was my fault. So I had to drive back to the school and straighten this all out. Which was actually pretty easy to do, just annoying.

Fear the Mind Wanderer

Letting your mind wander is a major cause of unhappiness

On Papers

My current paper writing style hearkens back to my more inefficient pre-computer underclassmen years in college. Then for a five page paper I would write about eight or nine pages on whatever moved me about the topic then make an outlines and literally cut and tape the pertinent parts of the draft into the outline and stay up all night retyping the final draft from the collage looking original.

Currently I am taking my source information, interviews and observations I had done, and writing a paper from that, basically treating all of the data as important, then going back and looking at what the professor wanted, what theories we have covered in class that seem to match up with what I have already written, once I am able to cram in an acceptable amount of applicable quotes and references, then I begin to slough off the unnecessary parts.

Hopefully by next semester I can regain the ability to make a well thought out outline in advance and then more efficiently just fill in the needed info into each slot, and writing the final draft will be more of a gentile smoothing out than an amputation of half of what I have written.

San Fran bans toys in some fast-food kids meals

Drug experts say alcohol worse than crack or heroin

America really needs to reexamine it's views on alcohol as being the "okay way to get intoxicated" while criminalizing healthier ways, resulting in millions of people being sent to jail, thousands of people being killed in the illegal drug trade, and billions of dollars being wasted on the war on drugs and incarceration.