Day 2: The Meaning of My Blog Title

It has taken some perseverance to get this page to even let me write a blog. Whew! I entered my email address, but the page would not accept my password. So I entered my second email address and password, but the page said I did not have a blog. I knew I had a blog, so I went back to the first email address and password. It eventually gave me a window that asked if I had forgotten my password, to which I said yes. Then it said it was sending a temporary password to my email account. When I went to my email account, it said that someone had hacked into my account and I would need to reset my password. Well, no kidding. When I reset my password, it let me into my account, but there were 595 messages in my inbox and downloading them apparently froze the computer. After waiting about 20 minutes, I had to turn the computer off and start again. Then, when I tried to get into my blog page again, it wouldn't accept my new password! WTF! I finally got in by using the old password that it wouldn't accept in the beginning! Why does everything have to be so hard for short people?

Anyway, I wanted to do Day 2 (yes, I am all the way to Day 2) of Allison's blog challenge: What is the meaning of your blog title?

Back in my Life Management days, there was a member of one of the teams who had a book entitled Notes to Myself. The book was filled with a variety of thoughts and sayings that the author personally found worthwhile and inspirational. As I remember it, there was a comprehensive index, but the sayings were not in any particular order of importance or divided into subject or anything. They seemed to be entered at random, perhaps on the day they were thought up or read or heard. I have always liked the idea of doing the same thing: just having a notebook handy so that I could record my thoughts or sayings or quotes that I especially liked or that were of personal value to me. I guess that is what I wanted this blog to become: a place to record my own or others' worthwhile thoughts and ideas. So I entitled my blog "More Notes to Myself."

Here are some of the "notes to myself" that are close at hand tonight, so that I can show you what I mean. They were mostly things that I quickly wrote on post-it notes that have stacked up in my papers drawer.

1. The hardest thing you'll ever learn is which bridge to cross and which to burn.

2. Geography is destiny.

3. Things don't just work out. They are worked out. (John Sandford in Secret Prey)

4. Most men live lives of quiet desperation. (Henry David Thoreau)

5. My life is my message. (Gandhi)

6. We must be the change we wish to see in the world. (Gandhi)

7. Change isn't just possible; it is necessary.

8. No one knows what a boy is worth.

We have to wait and see.

But every man in a noble place

A boy once used to be.

9. Sound is touch at a distance.

10. Happiness is not just getting what you want. Happiness is getting what you want after you have worked hard for it.

11. (A journalist on interviewing) "If you are present for that person, if you will be their witness, they will bring up what they need to bring up. I let people go where they need to go."

12. (A bumper sticker) "We kill people to show people that it is wrong to kill people."

13. If you never stop achieving, you never have time to appreciate what you have achieved.

14. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. (T.S. Eliot from Four Quarters, Little Gidding, pt. 5)

15. A story is an attempt to repair the world.

16. Thou shalt not operate on the day of a patient's death.

17. (from "Grey's Anatomy") "Easy" is not part of your job description.

18. (and Geoffrey will remember this one from the movie "Identity.")

As I was going up the stair,

I met a man who wasn't there.

He wasn't there again today.

I wish, I wish he'd go away.