everything has a quality you can cherish it for

 you can cherish something for being big

wow! I just made a BIG mistake!

you can cherish something for being small

my W2 form came on such a SMALL paper! I feel like they're not normally that small. Why is it so small?! I cherish that!

you can cherish something for being yellow

yellow M&M. you're the dumb one. and the red one is the angry one. but I don't think dumbness is a quality inherent to the color yellow. I cherish you all the same

Sometimes when I feel like using fancy words I like to get in people's faces about it and ask them if they know what the word means because I think they probably don't and then I tell them what it means by using simpler words and then they'll say "WELL WHY DIDN'T YOU JUST USE THAT WORD' and then I smile because they've fallen right into my trap and then I say "Because the human experience is endlessly vast and varied and occurs and infinite detail so why would not want as many colors as possible to paint with?!"

Which is true. If you give all the burden of being understood to the speaker and none to the listener then yes you should be as specific as possible BUT it's just as easy to put the burden on the listener and say 'I like the painting because it's BIG and YELLOW' and as the listener if you dismiss that as trite and banal it's because you didn't take the time to consider how cherishing something for being big and yellow is actually a beautiful thing to do.

big pile of snow outside of sign making business had sign on it that said 'FREE SNOW'

tell on myself

 "Maybe you should tell on yourself more," he says to me.

"What's that?" I say back.

"Well you keep doing things you're not supposed to do and then someone goes and tells on you and get in a lot of trouble. Why not skip the middle step and tell on yourself instead of waiting around for someone else to do it?"

"Won't I just get in trouble faster that way?"

"No. No. No. It's a brave and honorable thing to admit your own faults. Everyone is doing something wrong all the time so it's very honest to confess."

"I don't think it works that way."

"Sure it does. If you do something wrong because it's convenient for you in that moment and then admit to doing it--all you've done is exert your will without shame. It's much worse to not act at all or to act but then have someone else talk about it--you'll seem a coward."

I rip out the Tree of Life by its roots and throw it into the Sun. The world freezes and burns as it ceases to turn.

responding to a conversation I had this weekend

 To some extent I understand the logic of, I'm going to give people I care about a hard time or challenge them or antagonize them because I want to inoculate them against the people out in the world who are going to do that. But I think the emphasis should overwhelmingly be placed on caring and understanding. I'd put it at ratio of 9 parts understanding and support to 1 part teasing. 

Yeah I'm sure if someone only ever received support and never got any push back, they'd probably be overly devastated when some stranger tried to antagonize them. But I think the inverse is way more dangerous. If you teach someone that the people who care about you are supposed to be mean to you, you're gonna end up drawn to horrible people OR you're not going to know how to assess someone who decides to show you support and they could be genuine and you don't trust them or they don't have your best interests and you can't see that because they're telling you things you've always wanted to hear. 

Priority number one should be being safe, stable, unequivocally supportive and that's your baseline you can work from. But if you don't have that then all the other stuff gets really screwy. 

ipad doodles

random bit of word thinking

 I was looking about the etymology for the word 'saint' and it was pretty boring. It was just some Latin word for sacred that sounds like saint.

But then I found the Old English version 'hallow' which shares the same root as 'holy' and basically in Old English the word for holy, 'halig' was derived from the word for 'whole' which was 'hailaz' and so a connection is made between things being sacred and divine and things being complete and healthy and whole. 

That's kinda cool I think. The Greek word 'hagios' also means divine and sacred but its connotation is 'different' or 'set apart from'. 

I think that's a very different sense of divine and I think the Greek sense is how most people interpret the word holy. The Old English version feels much more earthy and worldly. 

Which would you prefer? A divine that is separate and set apart or a divine that is healthy and complete and whole?

story from coaching at a climbing comp

 Today I was standing with this kid I coach and he's a great kid who got into climbing a little over a year ago and now he's competing in his first season and today was his third competition and it was at a gym that tends to set notoriously hard climbs. So we're standing there in front of this climb watching other people do it and making a plan and this kid I'm coaching is a good climber and he works really hard and I know he's going to be great if he wants to stick with it but there are still some moves that he's not as comfortable with and this climb looks like it's going to be a challenge for him. But he's got a great attitude and he's open to failing at things because he knows it's going to make him better in the long run.

This other kid is right in front of his, about to get on the climb, and the kid looks back and receives some directions from his coach and then he walks up to the start and sends the climb with relative ease. He looked good. He drops down to the mats and gets his scorecard from the judges and calmly walks back to where we are and his face immediately turns red and he begins sobbing uncontrollably. He sits down right in front of us and pulls his shirt over his face and keeps bawling. His coach walks over to comfort him and me and the kid I coach both kind of tastefully look away and act like we don't notice and after about 10 to 15 seconds of us standing in dead silence the kid I coach says, dry as a bone, 

"Well, that was encouraging."

I lost it. But then I had to quickly regain it because it looked like I was laughing at the crying kid which I wasn't.