Isms

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Neoplatonism: Supposed to be new. It’s ancient. Supposed to be about Plato. He’s ancient too. An ism in antiquity. Infused with the idea that trance will connect one to a higher power. Solipsism: Selfism. Like a child who won’t share, this ism is for those who think they’re the center of the universe. Cronyism: Friend worship. That’s all really. It can be described as paying a lot of attention to friends and close relationships, but no others. It gets so deep, this attention, as to be considered worship. Socialism: Social worship. Like Cronyism, only reversed, so that the zealous attention is paid to society. Tends to screw over the individual to benefit the crowd or the state. Fascism: Sometimes a covert racism, fascism is a way for dictators to remain in power, because any voting system is abolished. Favors the state over individuals. Sadism: sexual pleasure from inflicting pain on someone else. Masochism: Sexual pleasure from being subjected to pain. Racism: Worship of the race to which you belong. All others are considered inferior. Ageism: Worship of the age group to which you belong. All others are considered inferior. Intellectualism: Worship of the idea of intelligence. It used to be a devotion to learning. This ism sacrifices wisdom for encyclopedic trivia. Organism: Not a worship. Unless you’re a weirdo. An Organism is a system, usually complex, and usually considered alive. (I threw this one in here to test the attention span of the reader.) Republican-ism: The belief that only one party can govern a political system. Democrat-ism: The belief that only one party can govern a political system. Buddhism: The belief that a steady progression through selflessness will exalt an active practitioner. Christian-ism: The belief that a steady progression through selflessness will exalt an active practitioner. Judaism: The belief that a steady progression through selflessness will exalt an active practitioner. Materialism: Worship of physical possessions. Sexism: Prejudice against the opposite gender. Audism: Prejudice against the hearing-impaired.

If you’re practicing any prejudice against others, just stop. Most of us have more in common than we have differences. Like the lizard above, we can bridge the gap!

Break Room Discovery

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The office break room is a scientific place.

Social psychology comes into play when certain people who don’t otherwise associate within the company go in there at the same time. Who sits where? Who gets the comfy chair? Who gets the microwave first? Who has to heat up their food among the drippy splatter from the previous careless user? What topics will come up in conversation? Will that one annoying guy talk about his colonoscopy again? Will the ladies discuss their pregnancies in detail? Will that guy who has too many cats in his house come in the break room and send everyone packing because he smells like his method of hygiene is to bath in a pool of one thousand cats? Will the boss come in and ruin every conversation? Will that gal with the political fetish come in and bore everyone to tears or bleeding ears? Will someone find their food has been stolen out of the refrigerator?

All of these questions will need further study. So will the unknown substance in that container on the bottom shelf at the back of the refrigerator. The container is, of course, clear. Everyone can see the stuff inside, but no one knows what it is. No one claims it. How did it get there in the first place? Did some outsider bring it in when no one was looking? Is there some serial leftover depositor out there in the city? If so, where will he strike next? In an office near you? In YOUR office? How will he ever get caught? Does he leave his fingerprints on the mysterious containers? Has he ever been caught on camera? Or is he able to avoid cameras like Bigfoot does? If Bigfoot worked in the office, would anyone know about that? Maybe he does, and he’s the one taking the lunches out of the break room fridge. The best thing to do then is set up one of those wildlife cameras and some bear traps inside some lunch sacks. Strategically placed sacks will capture either Bigfoot or the leftover depositor. Either way, scientific progress will have been made.

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?