I love Twitter, let me start off by making you privy to this simple truth.  Why do I love Twitter? Because of its magnitude (I follow/am followed by people from every continent) and because of its speed (a lot can be expressed when you are not expected to be long-winded--talk about getting to the point!).  Having said that, I was skimming a series of blogs posted by other "Tweeple" (I admit I love the corny lingo as well) and came upon a blog that insisted readers (or ersatz readers if you really think about it)  place no value on quality content and that they only loiter on your blog for a mere 36 seconds.  The notion was that our collective minds and attention are not gratified by the Best-Of anything (they likened it to the McDonalds formula-make a burger good enough and it will be bought, rather than attempting to make the best burger in the world).  The writer was a proponent of pumping out mediocre content, and a lot of it, quickly!  I cringed.  Not because I believe I am to become the Best-Of-Bloggers, but because we as a society have come to accept mediocrity in all its various arenas.  Personally, I would like to challenge the nay-sayers of quality and invite them to put their best efforts forward.   And in staying in alignment with the writers insistence that the reader only stays a half minute on a blog, I closed the link after 30 seconds.  Ahhh, the laws of attraction at work!

I was reading a blog earlier, the premise of which was that events around us are mirrors of what is happening inside ourselves. Basically whatever wee see around us, for example people laughing and being in a generally congenial mindset, is a projection of our own good mood.  Conversely, if what we see around us is hostility and road rage (let's say) that is a reflection  of aggressions within ourselves as well.  Jung said that everything that irritates us about others can lead to better understanding of ourselves.  How we were programmed growing up will play a role in our reactions today.  Here is an example, I have a friend that when growing up was sentenced to cleaning the family bathroom as a punishment for breaking family rules (I remember that one rule she particularly liked to violate was not eating corn chips while in her bed...the crumbs drove her mother crazy, but she did it anyway).  While chipping away at her punishment, toothbrush in hand, angrily scrubbing the moldy grout of the shower, she was forced to use Pine Sol.  The green kind.  Let me tell you that to this day, if she so much as gets a whiff of Pine Sol in a restaurant bathroom, she hightails it out of there! So is it because she detests the smell of the forest green cleanser? No.  The scent conjures memories of her forced labor as a rebellious child.  To take it a step further, she was in the market for a cleaning woman,  when a new candidate showed up at her doorstep with her tools of the trade-vacuum, mops, windex- she refused entry to the woman until she sacked the Pine Sol.  Unreasonable? Maybe.  But it was a mirror of uncomfortable memories and of her mother's overbearing demeanor.  Interestingly, this friend demonstrates some of the same behaviors and rigidity that she was exposed to as a child.  All the quirks in our behaviors came from somewhere-some from childhood memories, others from more recent events.  Nevertheless, next time you find yourself getting irked by someone's behavior, scan yourself and you may discover something about yourself you previously were clear about.  We discover in ourselves what others conceal from us, and we see in others what we hide from ourselves.  Interesting stuff.

Today is one of those post-card-gorgeous days in Southern California that makes me truly grateful.  The skies are clear, the birds are chirping, and the sun is shining, perfect right?  Well for some of us we would wholeheartedly soak in the gloriously positive "vibes" of such splendor.  Then there are those that even in the face of beauty cannot seem to grasp the "light".  It is difficult for some to choose to see the bright side of anything, even something as obvious as a sunny day.  Instead, they focus on the damage that UV can cause, or the fact that they will be needing to run their air conditioning units more now that the weather is getting warmer, thus needing to spend more money on utility bills.  Why the discrepancy?  My father told me that  it is up to us to decide every morning how we choose to experience our days.  We can choose to be happy that we are alive, or we could choose to be sullen and mope through the day.  But the choice was ours, it was an internal decision.  I hope that those that read this post will choose to see the sunny side of life, to simply choose the positive.  At the risk of sounding trite, I wanted to start this "life-cast"/blog on a happy note!  Choose to be happier now.