Mediation

Went to mediation today - it was very nice. I didn't realize how much I needed that "detoxifying," session. I think one of the most important lessons I learned was how important it is to stay in the present - not to take on worries of the future or regrets from the past. As the ultimate control freak, this release is very difficult to do, but I shall endeavor to work on it (and subsequently improve on myself).

One of the best parts of the day was being taught mindful eating, which requires that you take a bit of your food, than put your utensil down, chewing slowly and really savoring each food. You are asked to focus on the food - honestly its the first time I have ever found a piece of watermelon heavenly!

Thanks to everyone's kind words on my previous post, I still am trying to recover from the incident and all that it brought out in me; which reminded me of Denmark, cause when I was there life was SO much easier, relaxed. Thus I included a picture of the Royal Danish Theatre all lite up at night. Because my residency was right behind this place, I walked past the Theatre daily. Enjoy, as I do, the magic of the building.

Mean Person

Its almost official, I am not a nice person. This weekend the family and I went to a friend's graduation party. This friend is going to my current school, VCU, of which I have not had the most pleasant of experiences. I let my temper get the best of me and berated her and some others in the group who also go to the school about how bad the place was and really the diatribe was in relation to just my encounters. It was not nice of me at all.

It also got me thinking...I have had fights with good friends (where others have not), argue with my family on occasion (when others do not). I let my temper and feelings of injustice take over and I get mad; I imagine slights where they are not, hold grudges and fly off the handle at often the slightest provocation. I am a mean person.

I now have to paths to chose - stay the same or try to change.

Is it to late for me? Can I become a good person? Do I want to..no one wants a real nice person around, because how do we feel better about ourselves but by putting down others? This is especially true in the Indian Muslim community. Oh God (have you abandoned me?) help me on the right path..

Odds and Ends

This comic always makes me smile - I don't have a real purpose for today's post, just a bunch of loose odds and ends flying around in my head.

Watched the movie Blood Diamond the other night. What a tragic story, it just broke my heart; particularly as I had read the accounts of one of the boy soldiers from Sierra Leone's civil war and knew the reality was that most families do not end up back together, rather they are torn apart and eventually got killed in the conflict. I just don't understand people, how they can do that to each other. Sigh.


I am already starting to forget my Danish - this is bad.


Love that President Bush blamed the Democrat's on the current gas price, that is classy - oh and his solution to rising oil prices because we are so dependent on oil is to drill for more oil, in the Arctic wildlife preserve. It is stupidest response I've ever heard of...let me see if I have this logic straight: gas prices are going up because we as a nation are dependent on oil (a resource that is running out), so the solution is to pool for more oil, a non-renewable resource, to lower prices in the short-run? But what about in the long-run?? How strange that with two oil men in the White House for eight years and what do we get, not only rising prices but a push to drill for more oil. Shocker.


Got back from Denmark and am now addicted to Top Chef. Is this part of my food crush?


For God's sake DON'T run the water when you are brushing your teeth, that is a HUGE waste!! What's wrong with you?!


Two more class sessions to go and than I am done - woohoo!!

Book Memo

I grabbed this book list memo from Random Kath. I'll be honest, I am surprised that some of these books were marked as "unread," because some of these books have been on the NY Time's best seller list, so I am not sure the accuracy of this list. But it is fun to play...

MEMO
These are the top 100 or so books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. Bold the books you have read, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.
*****

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A novel (I LOVED this book).
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Ulysses
Moby Dick
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife (Someone recommended this to me, it was AWFUL)
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha (oh another book that was AMAZING).
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: The life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: a novel (a good book but disappointing ending).
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Poisonwood Bible
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
To the Lighthouse
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Dune
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes: A memoir
The God of Small Things (my grandfather recommended this book for my book club, written by an Indian, it was ok, but the story was not really my cup of tea).
A People's History of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
The Scarlet Letter (literally WORST BOOK ever, does anyone remember what happens in the end?)
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
On the Road
The Catcher in the Rye (I don't know why people love this book, it was a blah story).
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
White Teeth
In Cold Blood: A true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
Treasure Island
1984
David Copperfield

Plea for Jelly Kean

Mad busy weekend prevented me from blogging properly.

Flowers from my lovely mum and her expanding garden. Don't they fit into my bedroom perfectly??

In light of rising oil and food prices, I would like to make a plea for my friend Jelly Kean and her campaign to raise money for America's Second Harvest. America's Second Harvest is a hunger relief organization that provides food assistance and assisting food banks around the country. Jelly Kean's been an old friend of mine, since middle school. We have many fond memories together (including the time she was sick and had her mom deliver birthday balloons to school for me or when we watched Shadowlands together despite my making fun of it throughout). Besides being an aspiring actress, Jelly Kean writes hilariously, I keep telling her that one day she will win an Emmy writing for the The Daily Show, but she doesn't believe me.

Jelly Kean is running her campaign concurrently with her quest to lose weight after a bad breakup right before Christmas (what a jerk!). She says that if she raises the $5231 goal she has set, she will post a picture of her bare ass on her blog - jellykean.wordpress.com . Though, I think Jelly Kean is beautiful as she is, I am proud of her quest to tackle hunger in America and some of her childhood food demons (which she writes about eloquently in her blog).

So if you have even a buck or two to spare, please consider donating on the sidebar of my blog, you're money will be going towards a good cause.

Obama Rally

Aye...where to start, what a day, what a day!!

The morning began average enough, got up, checked email, blah, blah...you get the hint. But than I went to work, at Nissan.

Today was not just an average concert but a Barack Obama rally!! Secret Service were all over the place, I've never seen the Pavilion with that much tight security. It was crazy. Famous reporters kept coming in and out, including the lady who does the BBC broadcast, Cady something (naturally I made a fool of myself when she came by, eh but who cares, I'll never see her again). Than there were all the liberals and fellow democrat's around, I was in heaven (though I couldn't say anything since I was working).

For this particular event, all of us Nissan staffer's were re-assigned to security and parking options (instead of what I normally do, guest services). I was given the VIP parking lot. The VIP parking lot was manned by a ton of Secret Service (because it was the entrance for the stage).

The cherry on top of this day was that I got to hang out with all these MALE Secret Service guys. Not only were they HOTTIES (all of them were hot I swear to God - is that an application requisite?), but charming, educated and funny! And no, before anyone asks, I did not get any phone numbers (if you see me at Nissan, I'm quite scary looking, frizzy hair, sweaty). All I know is that now that I'm around the DC area, I'll be keeping an eye out for these hotties!

oh and Obama's speech was great.

Burger King Agree's to Rate Hike!!

Super amazing news (to which I was awoken too by my sister on Saturday morning), Burger King agrees to the wage increase for tomato workers!!!

If you can recollect, I have been boycotting Burger King since the fall, after reading how the fast food corporation refused to the one (1) penny increase to the workers who pick the tomatoes for the burger giant. Well, after a year of holding out and participation by some of its senior management in unsavory tactics, Burger King has finally acquiesced to this pay rise.

For Burger King this one cent pay increase will amount to $300,000 a year in the net income (which is small since last year Burger King's net income was a profit of over $2 million) but for the poor farm worker who picks the tomatoes, the penny represents a near doubling of their wages or a 73% increase.

I am happy that I was involved albeit ever so tiny (my boycotting and writing a letter to Burger King and communicating this inhumanity), in perhaps making this world just a little bit better.

To read more - Oxfam America press release here