Perfect Disasters: A humorous essay

My husband and I stink at planning vacations.  Call us lazy, impatient, or foolhardy; we have trusted (or tempted) fate on many impulsively arranged trips.  We grow older and wiser–yet some habits die hard. 

          Many of our trips are spontaneous events–hunches of the moment.  Yet, even with advance notice, I am often reluctant to work at vacationing.  Why should planning leisure demand labor?  All Rick and I need is time together, preferably in nature.  While our couple-friends conduct month-long phone interviews, toil over brochures, and consult experts; we chose our honeymoon destination by looking for green areas on a map of Oregon.   Our intuitions plan our trips.  Unfortunately, we haven’t always liked their plans.

I’ve moved back to storiesthatwork.blogspot.com

This is a lovely site but won’t do some of the things Blogger does for me.  Please come visit me at

storiesthatwork.blogspot.com

I’ve moved back to storiesthatwork.blogspot.com

This is a lovely site but won’t do some of the things Blogger does for me.  Please come visit me at

storiesthatwork.blogspot.com

Squaring the Circle

I’m still tweaking this site to make it easier to read. In the meantime, here’s a great blog to visit—this artist creates a new mandala everyday.  Jung was a great believer in the usefulness of mandalas (they are found worldwide) to visually represent psychic wholeness.  When we create mandalas, we are symbolically working to mend the schisms in our own unconscious. 

Seems to work with today’s quote:

Dare to be naive.
- Buckminster Fuller

Jungian TV

I hope to get a new story completed soon.  In the meantime, if you like experimental drama, check out the critically acclaimed series, “The Singing Detective.”  We are renting it through Netflix.  Time magazine calls it a “daring dramatization of the subconscious.“  Like all mythic or fairy tale stories, it has plenty of bleak moments.  But these are balanced by verbal wit, crazy purple prose, and fantastic musical production numbers.  Highly recommended! 

Do you dream of famous people?

Speaking of dreams…..

Have you heard of the website posting dreams people are having about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton?   Here are the links: 

http://idreamofbarack.blogspot.com/

http://idreamofhillary.blogspot.com/

I can’t imagine the pressure these two are under since all of us are projecting our own psychological issues onto them! 

Critiquing “The Secret”

Have you read “The Secret?”

I tried to get it from my public library (just for research).  No dice.  They had eight copies–all out.  Same with my sister’s library.   On the bestseller list for 33 weeks, the book’s popularity reveals….what?  A gaping wound in our national psyche?  Are we feeling so desperate and incomplete that we hunger for magical powers?     

The Secret claims we can “attract” anything we want, through our thoughts.  If that were true, I’d have won the Pulitzer Prize by now.  Still, psychologists have proven that chipper attitudes can lead to happy results.  Think “self-fulfilling prophecy.” Even some brain scientists confirm:  when we make hopeful statements to ourselves, we train our brains to look for those hoped-for events.