What I've learned since moving to D.C. (some of which should be obvious): 0195

9701.  It is reasonable to do what other people have always done unless we have a very good reason not to;
9702.  It is reasonable to become educated and work and find love and have a family;
9703.  It is necessary to aim at your target, however traditional, with your eyes wide open;
9704.  You have a direction, but it might be wrong.  You have a plan, but it might be ill-formed.  You may have been led astray by your own ignorance and worse by your own unrevealed corruption;
9705.  You must make friends, therefore, with what you don’t know instead of what you know;
9706.  You must remain awake to catch yourself in the act;
9707.  You must remove the beam in your own eye before you concern yourself with the mote in your brother’s;
9708.  You are by no means only what you already know.  You are also all that which you could know if you only would;
9709.  Every bit of learning is a little death.  Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better;
9710.  Set your ambitions even if you are uncertain about what they should be;
9711.  The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability rather than status and power;
9712.  Status you can lose;
9713.  You carry character with you wherever you go and it allows you to prevail against adversity;
9714.  If you bend everything totally blindly and willfully towards the attainment of a goal and only that goal you will never be able to discover if another goal would serve you and the world better;
9715.  If you allow yourself to be informed by the reality manifesting itself, as you struggle forward, your notions of what is important will change.  You will reorient yourself sometimes gradually and sometimes suddenly and radically;
9716.  Tell the truth.  Or, at least, don’t lie;
9717.  Memory is a tool;
9718.  Memory is the past’s guide to the future;
9719.  If you remember that something bad happened and you can figure out why then you can try to avoid that bad thing happening again.  That’s the purpose of memory.  It’s not “to remember the past.”  It’s to stop the same damn thing from happening over and over;
9720.  Elizabeth likes escargots;
9721.  Charlie (Dog) likes strawberries;
9722.  Making a (New York-style) cheesecake (from scratch) is rather time-consuming. . . . A large part (of it) is letting it cool and set;
9723.  Charlie (Dog) likes cheesecake;
9724.  People think they think, but it’s not true;
9725.  It’s mostly self-criticism that passes for thinking;
9726.  True thinking is rare just like true listening;
9727.  Thinking is listening to yourself;
9728.  To think, you have to be at least two people at the same time.  Then you have to let those people disagree.  Thinking is an internal dialogue between two or more different views of the world.  Viewpoint one is an avatar in a simulated world.  It has its own representations of past, present and future and its own ideas about how to act.  So do viewpoints two, three and four.  Thinking is the process by which these internal avatars imagine and articulate their worlds to one another;
9729.  Training a dog is harder/more complicated than I thought;
9730.  Apparently, you can 3D print (dental) crowns (now);
9731.  Charlie (Dog) likes ricotta cheese;
9732.  Stop the discussion for a moment and institute this rule: Each person can speak up for herself/himself only after s/he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately and to that speaker’s satisfaction;
9733.  I think people (and, by extension, society) are more of what have you done for me lately versus what have you done for me in totality/cumulatively . . . we can be very myopic/shortsighted;
9734.  If you blame someone else, there is no end to the blame;
9735.  True words aren’t eloquent; eloquent words aren’t true;
9736.  Wise men don’t need to prove their point; men who need to prove their point aren’t wise;
9737.  Before a problem can be solved it must be formulated precisely;
9738.  Women are often intent on formulating the problem when they are discussing something and they need to be listened to even questioned to help ensure clarity in the formulation;
9739.  Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t;
9740.  The pulled pork at HammerDown Barbeque (HammerDownBbq.com) in Aldie, Virginia, is tasty. . . . The spicy sauce has a residual kick to it;
9741.  There are (red) foxes in (Old Town) Alexandria;
9742.  Escargots can (actually) be tender (in particular the escargots persillade at Bastille Restaurant & Wine Bar in Old Town Alexandria). . . . Who knew?
9743.  Apparently, Muammar Gaddafi had a crush on Condoleezza Rice;
9744.  How you treat yourself is how you treat others;
9745.  If you’re critical of yourself or you demand perfection of yourself, you’ll do the same to others;
9746.  You can’t have good relationships with others until you have a good relationship with yourself;
9747.  The University of Virginia’s men’s basketball team won the last NCAA tournament consolation game against Louisiana State University in 1981;
9748.  It’s (actually) really easy to make “pigs in a blanket;”
9749.  The cinnamon crunch bagel at Panera Bread is (pretty) tasty. . . . It’s more like dessert than (it’s) a bagel;
9750.  Chocolate chip bagels (specifically Panera Bread’s) are tasty, but I’d still rather have a chocolate croissant;

What I've learned since moving to D.C. (some of which should be obvious): 0194

9651.  People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand.  Faulty tools produce faulty results.  Repeated use of the same faulty tools produces the same faulty results.  It is in this manner that those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it.  It’s partly fate.  It’s partly inability.  It’s partly unwillingness to learn?  Refusal to learn?  Motivated refusal to learn?
9652.  Not everyone who is failing is a victim and not everyone at the bottom wishes to rise, although many do, and many manage it;
9653.  People will often accept or even amplify their own suffering as well as that of others if they can brandish it as evidence of the world’s injustice;
9654.  The attempt to rescue someone is often fueled by vanity and narcissism;
9655.  Your attachments are the source of all your problems.  The need to be right, to possess someone or something, to win at all costs, to be viewed by others as superior – these are all attachments.  The open mind resists these attachments and consequently experiences inner peace and success;
9656.  To release attachments, you have to make a shift in how you view yourself.  If your primary identification is with your body and your possessions, your ego is the dominant force in your life.  If you can tame your ego sufficiently, you’ll call upon your spirit to be the guiding force in your life.  As a spiritual being, you can observe your body and be a compassionate witness to your existence.  Your spiritual aspect sees the folly of attachments because your spiritual self is an infinite soul.  Nothing can make you happy or successful.  These are inner constructs that you bring to your world, rather than what you receive from it;
9657.  If your life is not going well perhaps it is your current knowledge that insufficient not life itself.  Perhaps your value structure needs some serious retooling.  Perhaps what you want is blinding you to what else could be.  Perhaps you are holding on to your desires, in the present, so tightly that you cannot see anything else even what you truly need;
9658.  To journey happily may well be better than to arrive successfully;
9659.  Compare yourself to who you were yesterday not to who someone else is today;
9660.  The more you like yourself the less you’ll need others to;
9661.  Negative emotions, for all their unpleasantness, protect us.  We feel hurt, scared, ashamed and disgusted so we can avoid damage;
9662.  Pain is more potent than pleasure and anxiety more than hope;
9663.  Children would not have such a lengthy period of natural development, prior to maturity, if their behavior did not have to be shaped;
9664.  If a child has not been taught to behave properly by the age of four, it will forever be difficult for her/him to make friends.  The research literature is quite clear on this.  This matters because peers are the primary source of socialization after the age of four.  Rejected children cease to develop because they are alienated from their peers.  They fall further and further behind as the other children continue to progress.  Thus, the friendless child too often becomes the lonely, antisocial or depressed teenager and adult;
9665.  Parents have a duty to act as proxies for the real world – merciful proxies, caring proxies – but proxies nonetheless.  This obligation supersedes any responsibility to ensure happiness, foster creativity or boost self-esteem.  It is the primary duty of parents to make their children socially desirable.  That will provide the child with opportunity, self-regard and security.  It’s more important even than fostering individual identity;
9666.  A child, who pays attention, instead of drifting, can play, does not whine, is comical, but not annoying and is trustworthy – that child will have friends wherever s/he goes;
9667.  Clear rules make for secure children and calm, rational parents.  Clear principles of discipline and punishment balance mercy and justice so that social development and psychological maturity can be optimally promoted.  Clear rules and proper discipline help the child, the family and society establish, maintain and expand the order that is all that protects us from chaos and the terrors of the underworld, where everything is uncertain, anxiety-providing, hopeless and depressing;
9668.  Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world;
9669.  If the world you are seeing is not the world you want, it’s time to examine your values.  It’s time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions.  It’s time to let go.  It might even be time to sacrifice what you love best so that you can become who you might become instead of staying who you are;
9670.  Bread is of little use to the person who has betrayed her/his soul even is s/he is currently starving;
9671.  It is not only that humans desire power so that they will no longer suffer.  It is not only that they desire power so that they can overcome subjugation to want, disease and death.  Power also means the capacity to take vengeance, ensure submission and crush enemies;
9672.  If you are disciplined and privilege the future over the present you can change the structure of reality in your favor;
9673.  There are many problems that money does not solve and others that it makes worse;
9674.  There are some actions that are so intrinsically terrible that they run counter to the proper nature of human being.  To dehumanize a fellow being, to reduce her/him to the status of a parasite, to torture and to slaughter with no consideration of individual innocence or guilt, to make an art form of paint, that is wrong;
9675.  Suffering is real and the artful infliction of suffering on another, for its own sake, is wrong;
9676.  Aim up.  Pay attention.  Fix what you can fix.  Don’t be arrogant in your knowledge.  Strive for humility because totalitarian pride manifests itself in intolerance, oppression, torture and death.  Become aware of your own insufficiency, your cowardice, malevolence, resentment and hatred.  Consider the murderousness of your own spirit before you dare accuse others and before you attempt to repair the fabric of the world.  Maybe it’s you.  You’ve failed to make the mark.  You’ve missed the target.  You’ve fallen short of the glory of God.  You’ve sinned.  And all of that is your contribution to the insufficiency and evil of the world.  And, above all, don’t lie.  Don’t lie about anything ever.  Lying leads to hell.  It was the great and the small lies of the Nazi and Communist states that produced the deaths of millions of people;
9677.  Consider that the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering is a good;
9678.  To place the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering at the pinnacle of your hierarchy of value is to work to bring about the kingdom of God on Earth.  That’s a state and a state of mind at the same time;
9679.  To have meaning in your life is better than to have what you want because you may neither know what you want nor what you truly need.  Meaning is something that comes upon you of its own accord.  You can set up the preconditions, you can follow meaning when it manifests itself, but you cannot simply produce it as an act of will.  Meaning signifies that you are in the right place at the right time properly balanced between order and chaos, where everything lines up as best it can at that moment;
9680.  What is expedient works only for the moment.  It’s immediate, impulsive and limited.  What is meaningful by contrast is the organization of what would otherwise merely be expedient into a symphony of being.  Meaning is what is put forth more powerfully than mere words can express by Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” a triumphant bringing forth from the void of pattern after pattern upon beautiful pattern, every instrument playing its part, disciplined voices layered on top of that, spanning the entire breadth of human emotion from despair to exhilaration;
9681.  Meaning is the ultimate balance between, on the one hand, the chaos of transformation and possibility and, on the other, the discipline of pristine order, whose purpose is to produce out of the attendant chaos a new order that will be even more immaculate and capable of bringing forth a still more balanced and productive chaos and order.  Meaning is the way, the path of life more abundant, the place you live when you are guided by love and speaking truth and when nothing you want or could possibly want takes any precedence over precisely that;
9682.  Do what is meaningful not what is expedient;
9683.  Popeyes’s Cajun flounder sandwich is (pretty) tasty;
9684.  A shift into self-acceptance means letting yourself off the hook of perfectionism and not caring what other people think of you.  It means not making your self-acceptance conditional upon achieving a certain goal, looking a certain way or seeking approval from someone else;
9685.  The minute you come into self-acceptance and understand who you truly are, how much you’ve overcome and that you are always doing the best you can, you will feel more confident;
9686.  Self-acceptance doesn’t mean you give up, settle, become content or stop pursuing what you’re called to do.  It means you stop judging yourself and open your heart to where you stand today in this moment;
9687.  Self-acceptance also means that we have to learn to go beyond our feelings and negative thoughts and choose to do what is right and what we strongly believe in even if we feel scared;
9688.  Believe in yourself;
9689.  Train your mind to see the good in every situation;
9690.  Do it for you;
9691.  It’s just a bad day not a bad life;
9692.  Take the risk or lose the chance;
9693.  Be brave enough to suck at something new;
9694.  If you will not reveal yourself others, you cannot reveal yourself to yourself.  That does not only mean that you suppress who you are, although it also means that, it means that so much of what you could be will never be forced by necessity to come forward;
9695.  If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character.  If you have a weak character then adversity will mow you down when it appears as it will inevitably.  You will hide, but there will be no place left to hide.  And then you will find yourself doing terrible things;
9696.  Error necessitates sacrifice to correct it and serious error necessitates serious sacrifice;
9697.  Lies warp the structure of being.  Untruth corrupts the soul and the state alike and one form of corruption feeds the other;
9698.  Milton believed that stubborn refusal to change in the face of error not only meant ejection from heave and subsequent degeneration into an ever-deepening hell, but the rejection of redemption itself;
9699.  We must make decisions, here and now, even though the best means and the best goals can never be discerned with certainty.  An aim, an ambition, provides the structure necessary for action.  An aim provides a destination, a point of contrast against the present and a framework within which all things can be evaluated.  An aim defines progress and makes such progress exciting.  AN aim reduces anxiety because if you have no aim everything can mean anything or nothing and neither of those two options makes for a tranquil spirt.  Thus, we have to think, plan, limit and posit in order to live at all;
9700.  Some reliance on tradition can help us establish aims;