This post won’t be lengthy…As a result of learning about beautiful boy in the above photo, I have been thinking rather than writing–contemplating life, the afterlife, time, and the precious gifts we all are so very lucky to have here and now.

This little boy was James Bulger, and he died almost 20 years ago. He was only 2. His death was not accidental, and the story enraged the local community. Photos and videos of James have touched the hearts of people all over England (his home) and the world. This precious little boy is being officially commemorated through a project:

Here is information about the project and the precious little boy: http://www.justgiving.com/jamesbulger

The project will help save the lives of children whose lives are at risk through a school in England as a safe haven for children who are bullied–specifically those children who are harrassed to the point of serious physical (and psychological) danger. In this shelter, the youths can continue to learn in a supportive and safe environment until they are ready to transfer to mainstream schools again. Classes are set to begin this spring. The project is run on donations.

Please visit this website and see if you feel this is a cause you would like to support. I visited and used PayPal to make a donation. It was very easy.

PS. All donations are in pounds, so if you enter the number “20,” that means 20 pounds, which equals roughly 40 dollars! If you want to donate $10 dollars, enter “5″ into the blank. And so on.

Wow! Has it really been over a month since I wrote on this blog?? Where does the time go? Well, I guess I’ve spent my time mainly 1) fantasizing about new ventures 2) getting very annoyed about certain aspects of my job–not Hot Boss, though 3) enjoying the success of some ventures I started last year. So, while the first two activities are somewhat sketchy and a little pathetic, the third one validates my dreaming and scheming. At least to the point that the friends and family who are forced to endure listening to all my dreams and schemes no longer look terrified when I start talking about my next big thing. (Unrelated comment: for some reason, when I write fragments and treat them like sentences, it makes me feel sort of cool and rebellious. I hope that doesn’t annoy anyone.)

Anyway, sort of in line with the theme of dreams and schemes, I know of a person who I want to share a little bit about. This person is neat, but somewhat…the type one could worry about due to his lack of diligence and what seems like…well, odd goals and poor decisions in some ways. I kind of want to see what you think:

I can’t tell you his name, but he was born in Kapuskasing, Ontario, Canada. His mom was an artist and nurse, and his father was an electrical engineer. The family moved to California, so this guy ended up going to Fullerton College. He studied physics and English at first, but majored in philosophy. He ended up dropping out of college and worked several jobs. He found a truck driving job and stayed with that one for quite a while…Then he watched one of the Star Wars movies and felt really inspired about movie making. So, he decided to quit his truck driving job to enter film school.

Do you think that this will go okay for him? The scenario looks bleak, but I hear the story and want to have hope…

Well, fast forward. That story actually happened many years ago. Now, things are going pretty well for that individual. He graduated film school and did a bunch of other stuff. Currently, his movie Avatar is the 2nd highest grossing film ever (at a total of $1.14 billion worldwide). Avatar is second only to Titanic, the highest grossing movie of all time. Funny thing–this guy also wrote and directed Titanic. So this former truck driving college drop out now holds the top 2 spots of highest grossing films ever! (The Star Wars movie that inspired him to go to film school was the original movie that was released in 1977.)

One more note: Both Titanic and Avatar were very, very, extremely widely ridiculed for taking so long to make and costing sooooo much money. It was just assumed that Titanic didn’t stand a chance at earning back its cost, especially considering that the two starring actors were complete Hollywood nobodies…Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet.

His name, his name, yes, of course the cat’s now out of the bag. The philosophy major, truck driving, college drop out who went to film school because he liked Star Wars is James Cameron. I never knew anything about him until I read this article and this biography about him just now…

Pretty neat. These articles made me think of a book that was popular several years ago. Remember that book Life’s Little Instruction Book? James Cameron sort of embodies my very two favorite quotes from that book:

1) Don’t ever deprive a person of hope. It may be all he has.

2) Don’t give up on anyone. Miracles happen every day.

Darn it. It is 11:20pm now. I am going to try to force myself to go to sleep rather than spend all night researching the internet on other people who inspire me like Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Suess, and John Forbes Nash, Jr. (the guy who inspired the movie A Beautiful Mind). Thank you for stopping by.

He fixed eggs and put a LOT of ketchup on them for my sons. Why am I telling you that part? I guess because I don’t really like that my children are getting into the habit of putting ketchup on food it doesn’t belong on…In fact, what DOES ketchup belong on except maybe hamburgers and fries? Perhaps on a hotdog…I think that’s about it. Certainly not eggs. Certainly not carrots, another food my 5 year old REALLY wants to put ketchup on. Certainly not rice, another food he wants to put ketchup on…Definitely not chicken, another food my 5 year old wants to put ketchup on. Okay, enough. That’s too many times to say the word “ketchup” in one blog post…

SO, my husband fixes dinner. It was great. He’s such a good cook. Those 3 meals he has cooked over the last 12 years were some of the best meals I’ve ever eaten! I’m not joking–about the frequency or the deliciousness.

The problem took place after dinner…I started doing the dishes. I reached in to clean my favorite spatula. It’s plastic, beige, a little burned on one of the sides. That’s ok. Makes it look reliable and well-liked. Because it WAS. That spatula was…super. Super Spatula. That’s what I’m going to call it. Because that’s what it was…Super Spatula was so light, so nimble, so quick. Super Spatula could slide any food from any pan–heck, I bet Super Spatula could have slid fried eggs off gravel and had them looking shiny and smooth.

But Super Spatula is gone. Super Spatula was somehow broken. Broken in half. I don’t know why. I don’t know how. All I know is that my husband put both halves in the sink to be washed, and then pretended like there’s nothing wrong with just using the top half.

“Holly, you can use just this part! You don’t NEED the handle.”

Um, YOU don’t need the handle. I…I need the handle. THANKS.

PS. I want to post a photo of what’s left of Super Spatula, but my camera is broken. I think I’m getting a new one. That’s hard for me to do because it’s expensive, and I hate buying expensive things…It may take a few more blog posts. Oh, I could always use my husband’s $1000 camera (not actually sure how much it cost, but knowing him, no LESS than say…$300.) But I don’t like it. I feel opposed to it because it’s wasteful. Also, I don’t know where it is or how to use it.

1) Actions speak louder than words. This is a major one. My husband lives by this rule. No one can fool him. He can always spots a crook, a smoozher, a liar, but also a kind-hearted soul or person in need. He watches actions not words. I have learned to do that too, and it has made life much more predictable for me.

2) Confrontation is useless–but so is doing nothing at all. I used to confront everything. Then I realized, that’s dumb. By “confrontation,” I mean basically verbal confrontation. Problems must be solved. Injustices must be handled . But trying to solve things by verbally teaching or telling people seems very ineffective compared to the ways my husband handles things–he never confronts, yet he always “wins.”  I need a whole new post to detail how he goes about problem-solving without confrontation, but for now, suffice to say he is peaceful, and rather than trying to teach people how to be nicer to him or more fair, he just finds ways around those people (or situations). I’m not a postergirl at these methods, but I’m learning.

3) Everyone tries to do a good job, even people who fail miserably at it. That my husband feels this way makes him sound kind of soft. He’s not. He’s very stoic and unemotional. But he does have the interesting view that evilness in people is like a folly that they can’t really help…when people act evil, usually their perspective is so unhealthy that they truly have no idea they’re being evil. So, if mean or rude people could be better, they would. But since they can’t, it’s easiest to just let them be what they are (even if it’s evil) and just focus on you. (By ‘can’t’ I don’t mean they don’t have a choice. I mean for whatever reason, they don’t know how to enact that choice.)

4) Being normal is not as important as it seems. My husband doesn’t really know the basic rules–like when normal people wake up, what they eat, what they wear, and so on. So he doesn’t follow these “rules.” This used to REALLY freak me out. But I’ve realized that it’s not all about being normal. It’s about being real, which he is. I dated normal guys before I met him. They just seemed and looked normal. But they had problems that would have been really strange and irritating. (I posted about them here.)

5) Minding my own business is key. No one is ever mean to my husband. Now, part of that is probably that he looks like a rather frightening criminal. BUT the other part is that he doesn’t give people reason to bother him. He’s nice, and when friends and colleagues talk, he listens, but he never tries to impose his viewpoint. He keeps his distance, and he minds his own business. It works well for him. I’m more social than he is, but I learned from him not to focus on what other people are doing. For example, at work I used to get really irritated when people took 3 hour lunch breaks. I learned–hey, that’s not my business. And life is much easier when I don’t worry about other people’s lunch breaks. That’s the beauty of never working as a manager.

6) It’s fine when people get mad. This is a point I may have learned in any marriage since you’re bound to get mad at each other. When my husband is mad, he stays mad for a long time. Sometimes he gets mad for justifiable reasons–such as when I used to chain smoke and curse a lot–I mean, not a huge deal, but whatever, I see why changing that could be better so I did…BUT he also gets mad about really stupid stuff. Like when he somehow thinks I’m suppose to wake him up in the morning as if I’m a walking alarm clock…This is a situation where he’s mad, but I’ve done nothing wrong. In these scenarios, I learned not to care and just to let him be angry and get over it. It’s not about whether he (or any person) is mad–it’s about whether I’ve done something that’s right or wrong. If I am wrong, I try to fix it. If I did nothing wrong, I move on with my day and have fun. But before marriage, I was not able to feel at peace with this. I’m glad I learned.

Okay, I had like 10 things to list, but it’s now 1:00am. So I need to go to bed. I’m not sure I like this post. It feels rather preachy and irritating to me, but I really wanted to share things I’ve learned from my husband because there are so  many of them–and they have helped me and bettered me as a person. (Note: The next post about how I play immature mind games with my mother-in-law. Hopefully, that will remedy any unintended preachiness that is displayed in this current post.)

First, I don’t communicate with her. By this I mean, I send her about 2 emails per year–in response to emails she sends to me. YET even so, she manages to fit in some negative insults about anyone and everyone–even people I don’t even know, several compliments to herself about various qualities she feels she has, and generally one or two lies. Occasionally there will be a request for help–despite of course, her refusal to help us in any way AND feel sorry for herself because of this.

So recently, it happened again. She sent an email to me, and I responded to it, and the discussion went downhill fast. First she said something about how she finally is home where she can use the internet again and email me. (Like this is going to make me happy. Like this is going to make anyone happy. Believe me, anyone who gets email from this lady is very, very sad she’s back home with internet access. But it’s not like we can just tie her up and lock her up somewhere with no internet access–after all, if we COULD do that, we would.)

Next she explained how her daughter’s getting a divorce from her horrible husband, and oh, (I’m quoting), “I didn’t get involved at all. Not at ALL. But he screamed at me. He screamed at my daughter from the beginning, and now he even screams at me. I told both of them that this is just no way to live…” and then continued to demonstrate the degree to which she was not involved in their separation. As she told this story, she kept repeating things like how tolerant she has been of her daughter’s husband and how she stayed out of it. In addition to this, she slipped in few negative comments about her daughter, and many additional negative comments about her daughter’s husband. (Both of them are very normal people and very nice.)

My FAVORITE part was next–when she said, “Holly, it’s different with me and you.” (Really? Oh yeah, because you and I like each other…gotcha). Holly, I consider you my own. (Really? You do? Is that why you talk behind my back to all of your neighbors and stuff whose kids tell me about all the nasty things you say? Hahahha. Clearly, they have NO IDEA what they are talking about because you just said you consider me your own. Words mean so much more than actions. They do. I’m serious.) But my daughter’s husband…I just never could consider him my own. (I’m pretty sure he’s okay with that.)

So anyway, her next and last point was a reprimand. No communication from my mother-in-law is complete without some form of reprimand, correction, insult–it is colored with the degree of emotion she feels about whatever she needs to teach you at that moment, as well as her mood at the moment she addresses this ‘issue’ she has with you.

Her issue was that I’d posted family photos, but they didn’t include a photo of my husband. Uhhhh, OK. I hadn’t posted photos in months. The reason is because it’s too time-consuming. I have 3 young boys. One of them is ONE. When I’m not working, I’m chasing that little guy around the house and up and down stairs, fixing dinner, cleaning the house, and doing a million other things. I was thinking she’d write something like “Thank you for letting me see how my grandsons have grown!” But no, it was “They look so wonderful. Yes, it sure is a pity you didn’t include a photo of my son…”

SO, I was forced to employ the secret mother-in-law manuever. I wrote a really smarty pants email to her in response just saying basically can you please EVER be grateful for ANYTHING without your stupid feedback? But that’s not the good part. The next step–and the critical one–is then blocking her emails to me. SO, she will email me a super nasty response back. Will it bounce? No, it will not. She will think I received it. But I WON’T!!! I will continue to live in peace without continuing the discussion. YET, she too will live in peace feeling the got the last word. (To her, the last word is worth living and dying for.)

The beauty…Actually I had the last word–she just doesn’t know it! I’m okay with that. She can think she told me off. I won’t have to worry about her for about 6 more months. Oh, or maybe more depending on when I decide to un-block her emails. It’s aaaallll up to me. I like it.