The Six-Word Memoirs

One might argue that economy in writing necessarily causes meaning to be lost. However, Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser have shown that messages can be short on words while deep in meaning. Founders of the online magazine SMITH, they asked the world to send in six-word memoirs. ... Over 15,000 people responded to the challenge. Some notable examples posted on SMITH include these:

• "My second-grade teacher was right." - Janelle Brown
• "Secret of life: Marry an Italian." - Nora Ephron
• "Took scenic route, got in late." - Will Blythe
• "Became my mother. Please shoot me." - Cynthia Kaplan [April's note: LOL]
  
• "It's pretty high. You go first." - Alan Eagle

(From Managerial Communications by Geraldine Hynes)

If you had to write a six-word memoir, what would it be?

Jesus was an ineffective communicator

"...Do you ever think about what an ineffective communicator Jesus was? Think about it. He could have been speaking to 5,000 people every night. He could have been filling hills and shores and city squares constantly. Instead, he wasted his time at dinner with 12 people. Instead, he called individuals out of trees or chatted up one person at the well. And these weren’t powerful, influential people who could have dramatically helped his cause with their networks. He wasn’t connecting with “connectors.” These were sinners, tax collectors and fishermen. That seems counterintuitive to really building a platform. Why did he do it?

Because I think he knew how important relationships are. I think he knew that if you build a platform and when you stand on it no one really knows you, you’re alone. There might be a crowd of people around you, but if nobody knows you, that’s the worst kind of loneliness there is. I think he knew the value of a friendship."

~Jon Acuff

October

"I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. It would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn't it?"

~Anne Shirley, Anne of Green Gables

Souls and synapses

I have just one week of Anatomy & Physiology 201 left! It's hard to believe...where DOES time go, anyway?

Was just trotting along on the treadmill (a desperate attempt to keep myself awake long enough to actually, you know, study), and I came across the following in the chapter about the central nervous system:

Researchers in the field of cognition are still struggling to understand how the mind's presently incomprehensible qualities might spring from living tissue and electrical impulses. Souls and synapses are hard to reconcile!

Amen!

Living or watching life

Look at them--(a wave toward the marvels of Grand Avenue) all of those glamorous people--having adventures--hogging it all, gobbling the whole thing up! You know what happens? People go to the movies instead of moving! Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in American sits in a dark room and watches them have them!

-Tom in The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

Sentimentality

Are YOU a sentimentalist? (Maybe I should make a Facebook quiz on this! Lol!)

Sentimentality is indulgence in emotion for its own sake, or expression of more emotion than an occasion warrants. Sentimentalists are gushy, stirred to tears by trivial or inappropriate causes; they weep at all weddings and all funerals; they are made ecstatic by manifestations of young love; they clip locks of hair, gild baby shoes, and talk baby talk. Sentimental literature is "tear-jerking" literature. It aims primarily at stimulating the emotions directly rather than at communicating experience truly and freshly; it depends on trite and well-tried formulas for exciting emotion; it revels in old oaken buckets, rocking chairs, mother love, and the pitter-patter of little feet; it oversimplifies; it is unfaithful to the full complexity or human experience.
~Perrine's Literature

Am I a sentimentalist?

Guilty.

;-)

The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. Take joy!
~Fra Giovanni

Happiness...

From Elizabeth Goudge (1900-1984)...


She had long accepted the fact that happiness is like swallows in spring. It may come and nest under your eaves, or it may not. You cannot command it. When you expect to be happy, you are not and when you don’t expect to be happy, there is suddenly Easter in your soul, though it be midwinter.