How to be happy: make cookies.

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Don’t buy them at the store. That doesn’t make you work for your happiness. And everyone knows that happiness you work for is far more valuable than free happiness.

Also, I’d like to extend this challenge: when you make the cookies, mash up the butter with a fork. It takes a bit out of you. You learn your limits. Do you really have the muscles in your forearms to turn refrigerated butter to pulp? How long can you maintain the pressure? The cookies I like to make start with butter and brown sugar. Once the butter is softened, then the brown sugar needs to be blended in with the butter.

Don’t use a blender! Don’t use a mixer! Use the same fork and your now sore forearms! But don’t stop there. You have to add the regular sugar now, and that needs to be mixed with the butter as well. Get your trusty fork and get smashing. You might need the eggs around this point. Mix those in too.

Feel the burn in your arms? That’s good. Take a break and mix all of your dry ingredients together. Maybe all you need for that is a sifter and a good bowl, or a good bowl and a whisk. You choose. (Don’t use a sifter on the oats. That would be silly!) Once you’ve got all of your dry ingredients together, then you can mix that all in with your butter and sugar mixture.

Yeah, you know what to do—get that fork. Last but not least, you’ll need to mix in whatever optional ingredients you prefer: raisins to chocolate chips. That might be the tough part. But not for you. Just use your venerable fork and your now massive forearms. Mix it all in and be happy!

 

Oatmeal Cookies Supreme

(Mix in order of listing. Bake in an oven heated to 350 degrees F. 10 to 12 minutes. Makes about 24.)

Two sticks of butter (1 cup)

Two cups of brown sugar

One cup of white, granulated cane sugar

Three eggs

One teaspoon vanilla

 

Four cups of oats

Three and one half cups of flour

One third cup of ground flax seeds

Two teaspoons baking powder

One teaspoons baking soda

One teaspoon ground cloves

One half teaspoon ground cinnamon

 

Option1

One cup of chocolate chips

 

Option 2

Half a cup of craisins

 

Option 3

Half a cup of raisins

 

Option 4

Half a cup of peanut butter

Drive-thru Astrology

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Have you ever read your horoscope? I do sometimes, and I don’t have any faith in the things. It’s all about the wording. The wording kills the credibility. When the credibility is in question, I end up thinking, “I could do better.” I could pass that out at a drive-thru window.

Unforeseen circumstances will leave you circumstantially weary.

With a bald redundancy like that, horoscopes don’t seem cleverly orchestrated; they seem rushed, like some of the homework I did in high school. When you’re doing homework, don’t you shoot the bull more than you grab the bull by the horns? And that leads me to my next observation: horoscopes are full of cliches.

Take advantage of your good fortune. Plow ahead. Don’t buy the farm. Don’t kick the bucket just because you’ve counted your chickens before they hatched in a red hot minute when you should have been thinking outside the bock-bock-bocks.

Horoscopes are also full of really bad puns…

Be patient and all will be revealed to you in the coming daze.

The only time a horoscope makes sense is when your alcohol buzz kicks in or your grasp of logic leaks out. If you can’t see that the horoscope lines depreciate themselves, you might want to check your prescriptions.

Information you receive this month may not be entirely accurate. The answer may be different from what you expected…either by you or someone you know.

And aren’t they supposed to predict the future? It seems more often that they just fake a sensitivity to you and every other millionth person born around the same time as you. Oh, I’m not saying they’re not entertaining. They are that. But they seem so phony that it makes me wonder if they’re like those rap stars who take themselves so seriously that it makes me laugh. Unintentional humor.

Someone special to you may have eyes on you.

Speaking of unintentional. Do you think these brief lines about life are intended to be creepy? The writers of horoscopes do manage that at times. And then I wonder if they wouldn’t be better off writing something else, like a mystery novel. Then again, it could be that a novel writer, disillusioned from the literary world, decided to take his bitterness to the world of astrology.

An undertow that pulls at you from below could be Mars shifting your way. Or it could just be the weather.

They often get the indecision down to an astronomer’s precision, even if they are astrologers.

Dream your rainy days away. Don’t go out and play. Unless you love the rain. Then splash it up.

And don’t they play with your time? At times it’s monthly, others weekly.

Be wary around the middle or end of the month. Play it safe and beware the beginning as well.

In conclusion, have fun with it. Fall for it though, and you’ll give yourself a migraine. Probably, most likely, if no gamma rays upset the order of the galactic forces, it will happen around the third of the month in a year close to this one.

Naming Characters

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Have you ever had a hard time naming a character?

One of the conversations that circled my house on a recent Holiday was the subject of a mafia dude who got the hit put on him while he was in prison. His name was Whitey Bulger. In my mind, and other people’s minds as well: that is a name that screams “mafia dude!” It’s like he didn’t even try to hide his identity. I wish I had thought of the name Whitey Bulger.

To me, the challenge of naming a character is a fun one. Every once in a while, I feel like I discovered the perfect name for a character. When I do feel that way, I sort of do a little dance. Most of the time you’re just pulling names out of shadowy places. Am I right? If you write like me, then it’s true. Names can fit the character, or the character can fit the name, but that dichotomy of purpose doesn’t make the task any easier. Another element of the challenge is that you don’t want to name characters after people you know. People get offended at that. And they can get offended even if the character is heroic. So it’s much safer to use names that don’t relate to people you know.

I’ve used the name John a lot in my writing. I think that’s a difficult one to avoid since it’s such a common name (last name Smith, right?). The good thing about it is that it has so many variations, like: Jon, Jonny, Ian, Sione, Ivan, Johan, Joan, Johnette, Jane, Janet, and so on. There’s a version of the name John in every language.

One good way is to use Greek and Latin meanings to name your characters. This is especially good for last names. For instance, if I had a foreign character, I might fit them with the last name Exenos or Zenos.

A name can fit the character through the character’s traits. If the character had red hair, you could use one of the million and one words for a shade of red. Vermilion, Scarlet, Rouge, Crimson, Ruby, Maroon, Rose, Rosa, and so on.

Of course if you don’t like these ideas, you can use the phone book, right? What!? They don’t print those anymore. How’s a writer going to work in a world with no phone book?

Anxiety

notmuchleftSince I know a lot of people, even too many people, with some level or form of anxiety, I wanted to study it. How can I help them? What could they do to overcome it? The following items in this list are some things I found that may help. They also may not. It sounds like there’s only a little bit that doctors know about anxiety. Trying each of these in turn is your best bet.

  1. Prayer and meditation. Taking time out from a busy day to find your peaceful center and talk to God will give you confidence you never knew you had. Gratitude is excellent for positivity, confidence and peace. How many people wish they had peace in their lives but never settle themselves down long enough to meditate? How many prepare for bed by watching television, instead of getting quiet?
  2. Get the proper amount of sleep. Anxiety is compounded by lack of sleep. You’ll think more clearly if you get the right amount of sleep. Try a sleep experiment: Go to bed at the same time for three weeks. For that same three weeks, get up at the same time every morning. Avoid caffeine. Caffeine intake upsets the body’s natural rhythms. Get plenty of sunshine when you wake and splash water on your face, but don’t go for that cup of coffee. At the end of three weeks, you should be able to continue the rhythm without any artificial stimulants such as an alarm clock.
  3. Exposure therapy. It may be necessary to do the things that give you the most anxiety. Public speaking is number one on people’s fear index. Public speaking builds confidence like no other anxiety therapy. And one way to do it, even if you feel introverted is to think of it as speaking to yourself.
  4. Don’t be a hermit. Hiding from the world will not reduce anxiety. You can run away from the world, but you can’t run away from yourself. Hiding from the world is always temporary. Eventually you will have to interact with other humans. When that eventuality happens, how will you be prepared?
  5. Follow your role models. Find some people who have done things that you wish you could do. Find out how they did it, and then follow their lead. Role models, especially positive ones, help us have confidence in ourselves.
  6. Express your emotions. Uncork. We are all a shaken champagne. Don’t hold in the pressure. Sometimes just letting it out is exactly what you need. But if you’re going to yell, do it outside.
  7. Exercise. Exercise is the best way to balance the chemicals in your body. The appropriate amount of endorphins will boost your mood, make you more active, and enhance your appetite for healthy foods.
  8. Eat right. You’ve heard it before. The scientific community keeps finding new reasons that we should eat the healthy stuff instead of that candy bar and that soda. We know this. Our bodies tell us to eat healthy foods by giving us cravings. The hard part is exerting our will over the junk foods. When hungry for sweets, look for fruit. When hungry for something filling, look for proteins.
  9. Develop real relationships. Online relationships are good for friends who live far away. However, you still need the one on one, face to face interactions. Humans are social creatures. It may be beneficial for you to find a group of people who share your anxiety. By discovering that you’re not alone in your feelings, you can heal.
  10. Help others. Serving others in your home or in your community is a great way to boost your own self-esteem.
  11. When helping others, listen, don’t judge. Remember that we are all on the same path through life, though some may be at a different stage of the path. Try not to be judgmental of those at a different stage. And don’t compare yourself to them, either. No one starts out with all the skills. We have to learn the skills along the way.

Don’t Be Left Out

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It occurred to me some time ago that even though there are so many offended people in this world, there might also be a fair amount of people who have yet to find something to be offended about. For those feeling like an outsider because they have nothing to be offended about, here’s a convenient list:

  1. Whether you’re English or American, you can be offended at Green Day, an American band continually faking an English accent to try to sound punk.
  2. Be offended at “dollar” stores that charge more than a dollar for any item.
  3. Be offended at trees dropping leaves on the ground. Talk about careless litter.
  4. You could be offended that drones can fly but cars cannot.
  5. You could be offended at Donald Trump’s hair.
  6. You could be offended at coffee drinkers who treat their coffee cups like India’s sacred cow.
  7. Be offended at trolls.
  8. Be offended that grade schools teach Zero the Hero, but they don’t tell the kids that’s also the name of a Black Sabbath song.
  9. Be offended by any company replacing human jobs with robots.
  10. Definitely be offended by any movie with sloppy-cam. That pedantic crap died long ago.
  11. You should be offended that most chewing gum is laced with chemicals masquerading as sweeteners.
  12. Be offended at the size of your own bank account.
  13. Be offended at the size of another man’s truck.
  14. And yes, you can be offended at trucks with those rip-off, unauthorized Calvin stickers on them. Bill Watterson doesn’t get a dime off of those, even though he invented Calvin.
  15. Be offended at the division of society in which you fit.
  16. Be offended at anyone who stereotypes the division of society in which you fit.
  17. Be offended that marketing and advertising agencies are trying to profile you by those stereotypes.
  18. And you could be offended at anyone who fits in wherever they go. Weird, right?
  19. You could be offended at people who are continually making lists.
  20. Lastly, you could be offended at gumball machines that sell rubber balls that look like gumballs.