Mind

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The errant blogger returns. Better late than never, I suppose.

I do have a topic for today, but before I get to it, I feel an odd compulsion to share with you the rather bumpy and circuitous route by which it arrived in my brain. Synapses work in mysterious ways, and this is a fairly good example.

Bear with me here. The link density in this first bit will be rather high.

One of my Twitter friends, who goes by the handle @AliasGrace (and whom I met in person for the first time at PodCamp Halifax two weekends ago), has a blog entitled East Coast by Choice, for which I wrote a guest post three weeks ago. She's had a number of guest posts over the time she's been blogging, the most recent of which, entitled "The Death of Barrington Street?" and written by Paul MacKinnon (Twitter handle @downtownpaul), was a really interesting read.

Paul's post mentioned a number of well-known buildings on Barrington Street, but the one that caught my attention was the Green Lantern building. Now, being the geek that I am (you knew that, right?), you'd think I'd have known Halifax had a Green Lantern building. For some reason, though, I didn't remember the name at all. But, of course, I was tickled by it. So I went to my dear friend Google to see if I could find some pictures.

And find them I did. The Coast (our local artsy/cultural/gritty/emo/freebie newspaper) has an article about the building, complete with historical pics from the time when the building actually housed the Green Lantern restaurant. The building's official name is the Keith building, and it currently houses Pogue Fado, a traditional Irish pub. Nice to know the green is still there, anyway.

Still with me? Good. 'Cause I'll be getting to the point any second now. Read the rest of this entry »

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Well, as this is the sixth of January, the Christmas season is officially over. Today is Ephiphany, at least according to some calendars, and is the first day after the Twelve Days of Christmas (or Christmastide). I had originally thought that Epiphany was the twelfth day of Christmas, but it turns out I counted on my fingers wrong.

[I'll still wait until tomorrow to take my Christmassy banner off the blog.]

Anyway, on to the blopic at hand. On New Year's Day, I started writing what was to be my first post of 2010. It was all about how horrible 2009 had been, and it got rather long. It also ended up containing a lot of really personal stuff and a few passages that I now consider to be bitter whining.

So I decided to sit on it a while, and I've now come to the conclusion that this stream of negativity should not be posted. I no longer have anything against sharing personal stuff on this site, but some of the things I wrote on January 1st really went a bit too far. Read the rest of this entry »

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So what's the deal with me anyway?

I embarked on this blogging thing back in August with guns blazing and pedal squashed to the metal. I wrote a blog entry every day for seven weeks without so much as a hiccup (a couple of cheats, but no hiccups). I was on a roll, baby. I was smokin'. I was in the zone. I was—

You get the idea.

And I was professional about the whole thing. I wrote movie reviews, music reviews, book reviews, superhero reviews, and the occasional thoughtful or humorous blurt.

Life was good.

Or was it? Read the rest of this entry »

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Mind the Gap

Sigh…

I just don't think I'm going to be able to cover my tracks this time.

I will confess that I have occasionally missed a day of posting on this blog and have written two posts the following day, backdating one of them. That's cheating, but I did it anyway. I wanted all the calendar squares to be filled in.

This time, I've got nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. I've gone an entire week without writing a post, and though I was tempted to write six or seven posts over a couple of days and backdate them, I just don't think I'm going to be able to manage it.

I was doing so well. Seven weeks without a break. Even with the little cheats, it was still an accomplishment. So, yes, I'm disappointed that this gap has occurred. Read the rest of this entry »

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When I was a kid, odd notions would often enter my head. I'm sure this happens to many kids as they try to figure out the world. Some notions are curious, some interesting, a few are profound, and others are downright dangerous.

I don't think I headed in the direction of dangerous. I didn't think about obtaining firearms or explosives or anything like that. I think my odd notions tended towards the curious and the interesting.

There was one in particular, though, that was kind of mind-blowing if I thought about it too much. And it went something like this:

"There didn't have to be a me." Read the rest of this entry »

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I've read a lot of self-help books over the years. I'm always trying to find new ways to get past the obstacles that I place in my own way. Self-sabotage is a nasty critter, and I always have to strategize my way around it. Thankfully, there are a lot of wise and creative people out there who have figured out some interesting strategies.

Probably one of the best "mind" books I've read in the last few years is The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. Its premise is deceptively simple: We spend way too much of our time living in the either the past or the future, and if we simply stayed in the present moment more, we'd be happier and have less stress.

Let me clarify. When I say we "live in the past" or "live in the future" I mean we dwell on it too much. I don't mean we pop in and out like Henry (see my last post). We just spend a lot of mental energy thinking about things that have happened or worrying about things that might. Read the rest of this entry »

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