NOTES TO SELF;

Photo

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 21:38:41 -0700

"I wish we can go in a rocket ship and fly up to the sky so we can see Grandma Beng."

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 20:52:18 -0700

“I wish we can go in a rocket ship and fly up to the sky so we can see Grandma Beng.”

- Mar. 27, 2013 - My daughter; Laila - 4 yrs old - about my Mom who lost her battle to cancer on Aug. 13, 2012. We love and miss you so much, Mom.

"I’ve come to trust that events will not always unfold exactly as I want, but I will be fine..."

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 21:58:47 -0700

“I’ve come to trust that events will not always unfold exactly as I want, but I will be fine either way. The challenges we face in life are always lessons that serve our souls growth.”

- Marianne Williamson

Photo

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 21:28:15 -0700

Photo

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 21:27:51 -0700

staypozitive:

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 21:26:26 -0700

staypozitive:

When someone has a lot of energy before noon

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 11:05:14 -0700

whatshouldwecallme:

Use your smile to change this world. Don’t let this world...

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 16:36:10 -0700

Use your smile to change this world. Don’t let this world change your smile.

"With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts."

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 16:34:46 -0700

“With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.”

- Eleanor Roosevelt (via kari-shma)

"Don’t rely on someone else for your happiness and self worth. Only you can be responsible for that...."

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 14:18:48 -0700

“Don’t rely on someone else for your happiness and self worth. Only you can be responsible for that. If you can’t love and respect yourself - no one else will be able to make that happen. Accept who you are - completely; the good and the bad - and make changes as you see fit - not because you think someone else wants you to be different.”

- Stacey Charter (via kari-shma)

Nothing can bring you peace, but yourself.

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 21:43:30 -0700

Nothing can bring you peace, but yourself.

"Socializing is as exhausting as giving blood. People assume we loners are misanthropes, just..."

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 21:41:22 -0700

“Socializing is as exhausting as giving blood. People assume we loners are misanthropes, just sitting thinking, ‘Oh, people are such a bunch of assholes,’ but it’s really not like that. We just have a smaller tolerance for what it takes to be with others. It means having to perform. I get so tired of communicating.”

- Anneli Rufus (via selfinspiration)

When things end, it is not about getting over having loved them....

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 21:31:59 -0700

When things end, it is not about getting over having loved them. It is about getting used to loving them without having them in your life.

#bucketlist

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 21:24:45 -0700

#bucketlist

Never chase anyone. A person who appreciates you will walk with...

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 21:23:03 -0700

Never chase anyone. A person who appreciates you will walk with you.

"People are often unreasonable, irrational, self-centered. Forgive them anyway. If you are kind,..."

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:57:19 -0700

“People are often unreasonable, irrational, self-centered. Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind anyway. If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies. Succeed anyway. If you are honest and sincere, people may deceive you. Be honest and sincere anyway. What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight. Create anyway. If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous. Be happy anyway. The good you do today, will often be forgotten. Do good anyway. Give the best you have, and it will never be enough. Give your best anyway. In the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was NEVER between you and them anyway.”

"I have the deepest affection for intellectual conversations. The ability to just sit and talk. About..."

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 21:42:24 -0800

“I have the deepest affection for intellectual conversations. The ability to just sit and talk. About love, about life, about anything, about everything. To sit under the moon with all the time in the world, the full-speed train that is our lives slowing to a crawl. Bound by no obligations, barred by no human limitations. To speak without regret or fear of consequence. To talk for hours and about what’s really important in life.”

- (via creatingaquietmind)

"Strength comes from struggle. When you learn to see your struggles as opportunities to become..."

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 20:46:44 -0800

“Strength comes from struggle. When you learn to see your struggles as opportunities to become stronger, better, wiser, then your thinking shifts from “I can’t do this” to “I must do this.””

- Toni Sorenson (via maritessr)

lovequotesrus: Photo Courtesy: stellargrove

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 20:44:55 -0800

lovequotesrus:

Photo Courtesy: stellargrove

thedailywhat: On Kony 2012: I honestly wanted to stay as far...

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 20:44:07 -0800

thedailywhat:

On Kony 2012: I honestly wanted to stay as far away as possible from KONY 2012, the latest fauxtivist fad sweeping the web (remember “change your Facebook profile pic to stop child abuse”?), but you clearly won’t stop sending me that damn video until I say something about it, so here goes:

Stop sending me that video.

The organization behind Kony 2012 — Invisible Children Inc. — is an extremely shady nonprofit that has been called ”misleading,” “naive,” and “dangerous” by a Yale political science professor, and has been accused by Foreign Affairs of “manipulat[ing] facts for strategic purposes.” They have also been criticized by the Better Business Bureau for refusing to provide information necessary to determine if IC meets the Bureau’s standards.

Additionally, IC has a low two-star rating in accountability from Charity Navigator because they won’t let their financials be independently audited. That’s not a good thing. In fact, it’s a very bad thing, and should make you immediately pause and reflect on where the money you’re sending them is going.

By IC’s own admission, only 31% of all the funds they receive go toward actually helping anyone [pdf]. The rest go to line the pockets of the three people in charge of the organization, to pay for their travel expenses (over $1 million in the last year alone) and to fund their filmmaking business (also over a million) — which is quite an effective way to make more money, as clearly illustrated by the fact that so many can’t seem to stop forwarding their well-engineered emotional blackmail to everyone they’ve ever known.

And as far as what they do with that money:

The group is in favour of direct military intervention, and their money supports the Ugandan government’s army and various other military forces. Here’s a photo of the founders of Invisible Children posing with weapons and personnel of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Both the Ugandan army and Sudan People’s Liberation Army are riddled with accusations of rape and looting, but Invisible Children defends them, arguing that the Ugandan army is “better equipped than that of any of the other affected countries”, although Kony is no longer active in Uganda and hasn’t been since 2006 by their own admission. These books each refer to the rape and sexual assault that are perennial issues with the UPDF, the military group Invisible Children is defending.

Let’s not get our lines crossed: The Lord’s Resistance Army is bad news. And Joseph Kony is a very bad man, and needs to be stopped. But propping up Uganda’s decades-old dictatorship and its military arm, which has been accused by the UN of committing unspeakable atrocities and itself facilitated the recruitment of child soldiers, is not the way to go about it.

The United States is already plenty involved in helping rout Kony and his band of psycho sycophants. Kony is on the run, having been pushed out of Uganda, and it’s likely he will soon be caught, if he isn’t already dead. But killing Kony won’t fix anything, just as killing Osama bin Laden didn’t end terrorism. The LRA might collapse, but, as Foreign Affairs points out, it is “a relatively small player in all of this — as much a symptom as a cause of the endemic violence.”

Myopically placing the blame for all of central Africa’s woes on Kony — even as a starting point — will only imperil many more people than are already in danger.

Sending money to a nonprofit that wants to muck things up by dousing the flames with fuel is not helping. Want to help? Really want to help? Send your money to nonprofits that are putting more than 31% toward rebuilding the region’s medical and educational infrastructure, so that former child soldiers have something worth coming home to.

Here are just a few of those charities. They all have a sparkling four-star rating from Charity Navigator, and, more importantly, no interest in airdropping American troops armed to the teeth into the middle of a multi-nation tribal war to help one madman catch another.

The bottom line is, research your causes thoroughly. Don’t just forward a random video to a stranger because a mass murderer makes a five-year-old “sad.” Learn a little bit about the complexities of the region’s ongoing strife before advocating for direct military intervention.

There is no black and white in the world. And going about solving important problems like there is just serves to make all those equally troubling shades of gray invisible.

[kony2012.]