Thoughts about my daughters.

In the United States, approximately 45 million turkeys are consumed on Thanksgiving Day. The average turkey taken home from the grocery store is fifteen pounds. I did my best to polish off an above average weight, palatable poultry.

To be honest I made this attempt with 16 other family members and we couldn’t quite do it. We consumed about 50% and more will be saved for leftovers, sandwiches and soup.

Hallelujah! Praise God in his holy house of worship, praise him under the open skies; Praise him for his acts of power, praise him for his magnificent greatness; Praise with a blast on the trumpet, praise by strumming soft strings; Praise him with castanets and dance, praise him with banjo and flute; Praise him with cymbals and a big bass drum, praise him with fiddles and mandolin. Let every living, breathing creature praise GOD! Hallelujah!
Psalms 150:1-6 – The Message (MSG)

Focus on what you have to be thankful for, it’s a much better way to live.

As I continue to work through my psychology text, I find typical behaviors, and therapies to address those behaviors, quite fascinating.

Self-defeating behaviors are by far the most interesting. As people we adopt a behavior to protect us from pain, yet this selfsame behavior becomes our cage which keeps us in pain. The behavior usually “seems” to ease the pain but in the end it tends to isolate and only hide the pain rather than deal with it.

Here’re just a few self-defeating behaviors that jump out at me.

Procrastination – Putting off tasks that intimidate or overwhelm — ignoring the fact that the more they’re put them off, the harder they become.

Not admitting a mistake – I can’t learn from what I don’t acknowledge had anything to learn from

Insistence on being right – Even if the other person agrees in principle, he/she will feel stomped on — and is likely either to fight openly or to sabotage quietly.

The list goes on. My real question is, “How do I know if a behavior is self-defeating?”

My feeble attempt at answering would go something like this.

Begin be thinking before reacting. Easier said than done. What am I wanting right now? What am I wanting long term? Do the two agree? Is the behavior self-serving?

I don’t believe I can ever find true joy and contentment with my life if my only goal is to serve myself. Yes, I can “think” I’m happy getting my way but time has always proved that this thinking is flawed and doomed to despair.

That explains what is going on when I exercise a self-defeating behavior and I still feel empty so I do it even more. Like a hamster on a wheel, I think running faster will get me somewhere.

What is it that causes me stand my ground in all its glorious “rightness” when the end result looks something like shooting myself in the foot?

I can be dead on right but somehow lose the battle entirely. I guess when it comes to two people living in a relationship the point is not about who’s right or who’s wrong but instead the quality of the relationship.

I can stand my ground and be right or CHOOSE relinquish the rightness for relationship. Which is of greater value? Which will make me happy tomorrow?

OK. It’s so easy to browse and get lost in browsing rabbit trails that I invariably forget when I was looking for. Why is it them that when I want to find out what the hottest temperature endured by man in testing I can’t find it?

I spent more than 30 minutes on Google looking for this fact before I found what I sought. This is not the norm when I want information but it does happen more often than I’d like to keep track of.

Fortunately for me, those rabbit trails were very interesting!

I had a business trip last week, accompanied by very long work hours and a cold. My grand visions of quiet time to concentrate on completing the first chapter of my book fell by the wayside. Instead every spare moment was used for sleep. Surprisingly my mind was activated on the return flight, which gave me several hours of good concentration in which to work.

At this point I consider the draft of chapter one complete.

I’ll try to remember to publish a statistical post detailing my book project which I began a little less then two weeks ago. In the past 13 days, I created a rough outline of the book and completed about half of the first chapter. Those first 2,735 words were the easy part, only approximately 49,265 to go! I guess that puts me roughly at 5% complete.

Like everything else, it seems there is the easy, secret method to writing and publishing a book in no time.

Actual quotes from my Google search

How to Write a Book in 60 Days or Less
Discover how to write a book in less time than ever!
Awesome writing techniques.
Four-Step-Algorithm for Writing a Book

Last week I wrote about starting a book. My progress has been isolated to last week, mostly due to the distractions of family life. I have only had time to pen two or three marginal paragraphs since that time. Next week will see me on the road again, so I expect (read *hope*) I’ll have some of that quiet time to finish up chapter one.

In general I am pleased with what I’ve written thus far, but we’ll see how it turns out once I run it by a few of my (yet unknown to them) critics. The topic is of the deep rooted needs of men and I need to understand if I am speaking for the majority or simply my limited world. My feeling is that by the time I finish the third chapter it should be ready for that reality check.

Tell me there’s a quick easy method to write 50,000+ words and place them in a meaningful sequence and I laugh in your face!

I’ve been looking into defining respect over the last few weeks. Tuesday evening John McCain gave a most awesome example of what respect looks like in action.

My friends, we have — we have come to the end of a long journey. The American people have spoken, and they have spoken clearly.

A little while ago, I had the honor of calling Senator Barack Obama to congratulate him … on being elected the next president of the country that we both love.

In a contest as long and difficult as this campaign has been, his success alone commands my respect for his ability and perseverance. But that he managed to do so by inspiring the hopes of so many millions of Americans who had once wrongly believed that they had little at stake or little influence in the election of an American president is something I deeply admire and commend him for achieving.

…

Let there be no reason now for any American to fail to cherish their citizenship in this, the greatest nation on Earth.

Senator Obama has achieved a great thing for himself and for his country. I applaud him for it, and offer him my sincere sympathy that his beloved grandmother did not live to see this day. Though our faith assures us she is at rest in the presence of her creator and so very proud of the good man she helped raise.

Senator Obama and I have had and argued our differences, and he has prevailed. No doubt many of those differences remain.

These are difficult times for our country. And I pledge to him tonight to do all in my power to help him lead us through the many challenges we face.

I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating him, but offering our next president our good will and earnest effort to find ways to come together to find the necessary compromises to bridge our differences and help restore our prosperity, defend our security in a dangerous world, and leave our children and grandchildren a stronger, better country than we inherited.

Whatever our differences, we are fellow Americans. And please believe me when I say no association has ever meant more to me than that.

It is natural. It’s natural, tonight, to feel some disappointment. But tomorrow, we must move beyond it and work together to get our country moving again.

…

Tonight, more than any night, I hold in my heart nothing but love for this country and for all its citizens, whether they supported me or Senator Obama — whether they supported me or Senator Obama.

I wish Godspeed to the man who was my former opponent and will be my president. And I call on all Americans, as I have often in this campaign, to not despair of our present difficulties, but to believe, always, in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here.

…

Americans never quit. We never surrender.

We never hide from history. We make history.

Thank you, and God bless you, and God bless America. Thank you all very much.