Seven Days (Daily Prompt)

You wake up tomorrow morning to find all your plans have been cancelled for the next seven days and $10,000 on your dresser. Tell us about your week.

Honestly?  $10,000 would go towards paying off the vehicle loan we took last year when we bought the Super Truck.  That’s pretty much all it would go for, because it would knock the pay-off time down to half, and that would mean we could (possibly) pay it off by next year’s income tax season.

That may not sound exciting or glamorous, or even fun to some people, but not owing a bank a ton of money every month?  Is something everyone should strive for.

A Thought on Congressional Pay Raises

 So… with this whole “fiscal cliff” business going on, I’ve been doing some thinking about how it is that Congress can just vote to give themselves pay raises.  

I don’t think it’s very fair.  

1. That money has to come from somewhere… namely, We the Taxpayers.
2. As our Congressmen/women, they have all been hired to represent us.  To work for us, if you will.  When you’re hired to work for someone, you don’t get to set your own pay grade.  
3. I don’t think this Congress actually done a whole lot of working for the country they signed on to serve.  

Therefore, I think we should seriously consider a change to how congress gets it’s pay raises. I’ve been entertaining two options.  

Option #1 – every four years, we have a special referendum on the ballots,and we, as a nation choose by popular vote the fate of our elected representative’s paychecks.  

Option # 2 – Each state votes one their own representative’s raises.  If you’re state feels you’ve adequately done your job… you get a raise.    

Either of these would be better than letting a bunch of people who are only looking out for their own asses assets decide when they get the next windfall.  

Thinking about Dreams

I have been thinking keeping a dream journal, either online or on paper.

Occasionally, like last night, for example, I have really vivid, detailed dreams that would make good stories were I to write them and flesh them out.

If you’re a writer, do you ever use dreams as the basis of your stories or poems?

Does Bad News Travel Too Fast On a Windy Day?

Came home from church this morning to find this on my Facebook feed:

It’s a petition to ban the media from releasing the names of those who commit mass murders, like school/mall shooting, etc.  (I’m not going to weigh in on whether or not I think restricting the media is something the White House should do or not, but if you want to sign the petition, you can click on that picture and it will take you there.)

The person who created this petition did so using a quote by actor Morgan Freeman.

“Flip on the news and watch how we treat the Batman theater shooter and the Oregon mall shooter like celebrities. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are household names, but do you know the name of a single *victim* of Columbine? Disturbed

people who would otherwise just off themselves in their basements see the news and want to top it by doing something worse, and going out in a memorable way. Why a grade school? Why children? Because he’ll be remembered as a horrible monster, instead of a sad nobody.”

-Morgan Freeman

 

I was just thinking about this issue yesterday… not about banning the media coverage… but about how different it was when news didn’t travel faster than a bird can fly.

We live in a world where someone has blogged it or tipped off the media before victims  families even know. And before those same families can process what happened, the entire world knows the whole details, has begun assigning guilt and blame to any and everyone (from the perpetrators’ parents, to their teachers, doctors… etc. ), and tossing around phrases like ‘senseless tragedy,” “gun control,” and “punishment from God for our Nation’s Sins.”  And before the victims can even be buried… it somehow stops being about them anymore.  They’re dead and their families can’t even mourn them in peace through the media hype, endless rounds of interviews, and an onslaught of well-intentioned strangers grieving right along side them.

In light of the recent Connecticut school shooting, I find myself wondering… did these things not happen when I was a kid… or did they happen, but no one ever really heard about it?  I don’t remember it.  I really don’t.  So if there were people in other cities in other parts of the country who were committing crimes like this, I was blissfully unaware of it.

As a mother, I had to try and answer my daughter when she asked me ‘why do schooling shootings happen?’ and I think I failed at it.  I don’t know why.  I don’t know why people do horrible things.  Not many of us do.  And there is, sadly, not much any of us who live outside the communities where they occurred can really do… except to pray for the families of the victims and for the families of the perpetrators, as well.

But a part of me thinks that it would be better our young people didn’t have those images seared into their minds at such a young age, and I didn’t have to try and answer that unfathomable question… why do school shootings happen?  I wish my daughter was as blissfully unaware now as I was back in my childhood… back in the days before the endless stream of information we call the Internet.

 

 

NaNoWriMo 2012 Begins.

I decided to be a NaNo Rebel this year and finish working on last year’s novel.  I only got 9,000+ words last year, so I figured “hey, why not?”  Sooo… back to the world of fantasy dreams and scheming mages I go.  

I have 1669 words to show for today’s minimal writing attempt.  Go me!