by Michael J. Fox. This autobiography is inspiring and extremely well written. I really enjoyed it.
As the public we only see the strong and well coping Michael J. Fox and it was good to read about his struggle to accept and live with Parkinson’s disease. It was a very long, tough personal journey for him. His relationship with Tracy and his father are endearing and telling.
Outside of Michael’s personal story, I thought the following quote from Lucky Man was very reflective of what young Hollywood actors and musicians are going through today. With the death of Heath Ledger and the fall of Britney Spears, we look for reason and answers to why this happens to so many.
“An actor’s burning ambition, when you think about it, is to spend as much time as possible pretending to be somebody else. For those of us lucky (or unstable) enough to become professional performers, the uncertainty about who we really are only increases. For many actors, this self-doubt is like a worm eating away at you and growing, incongruously, in direct proportion to your level of success. No matter how great the acceptance, adulation, and accumulation of wealth, gnawing at you always is the deep-seated belief that you’re a fake, a phony. Even if you can bull-shit your way through whatever job you’re working on now, you’d better prepare for the likelihood that you’re never going to get another one.”
Insecurities are something common to this bunch. Imagine living your life under that sort of scrutiny, pressure and self loathing for just one day, let alone years on end. You would likely lose it as well.
Lucky Man also addresses the foundation that he formed. Although he never saw himself as an activist, he has formed an amazing organization who is actually in the business of getting results.
Support the fight for a cure for Parkinson’s disease.
Anyway, I digress. What am I addicted to, you ask? Puzzles. Specifically number picture puzzles. They are called hanjie, picture sodoku, paint-doku, crosspix etc. Whatever you want to call them, I am addicted. I can’t help myself. I find myself doing them either on paper or online, whenever I get the chance. It keeps my mind working, but is sometimes a distraction.
I play at griddlers.net. They have thousands of puzzles with a ton of variety, from simple to extremely challenging. One of my favorite things is that they have color puzzles. These are way more fun to solve and make really pretty pictures. As a premium member, you can upload your own images and convert them to puzzles. All of these are then available to all of the free members as well, so there is a constant supply of new puzzles.
My only gripes are that it only works in IE and sometimes the server is a little slow. They have introduced a new applet that you can get for $5 a month or you can play on the regular server for free. Seems fair to me.
More of a paper and pencil person? Check out these books
We choose our books for the year at our annual holiday party and I am really excited about this years picks. Lots of non-fiction this year, which is interesting.
To pick our books, each member brings a list of the books (or the actual books if they own them) that they are interested in recommending for their book club meeting (each member hosts book club once per year, which entails choosing the book and hosting the party). Each person then introduced their books to the group and when everyone was finished everyone chose one book from each person’s list/pile (we used check marks). The book from each persons picks with the most votes won and that was the choice.
This process was fun and worked really well, if you have a book club, I would really recommend this process for choosing books.
January – Lucky Man: A Memoir
February – Life of Pi
March – Not decided yet
April – Into the Wild
May – Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
June – The Red Tent
July – We take July off from reading, but this year we are going to have a summer BBQ and do the Please Understand Me
August – Brothel: Mustang Ranch and Its Women
September – Inside Delta Force: The Story of America’s Elite Counterterrorist Unit
October – Eat, Pray, Love
November – The Year of Living Biblically
December – Holiday party and choose books for next year.
I am talking about taking small steps toward the life that I choose. I find that when I look at the big picture as a whole, I get really overwhelmed. There is so much that I want to do and change that it just wades me down and paralyzes me. Theres stuff with the house, my health, the kids, the cleaning, what I am going to do about this and that and that and that.
So, I am trying to keep things in perspective and take life one step at a time. This is a process and not something that needs to happen overnight.
For example, this week I cleaned out two of the cabinets in my bathroom. This may seem a small thing, but for the last several months I would walk into the bathroom and say to myself “this is aweful, i need to clean out this old stuff” but then never do it.
I also washed all the hardwood floors this week. Now, I sweep and wet swiffer on a regular basis but the floors hadn’t been given a deep clean since before Ian was born.
I went to the gym twice this week as well.
Although these are small things, they are something and that is an improvement in and of itself. So my goal is to just do some things. Get up off my butt and do something I wouldn’t normally do every day.
As I write this, i realize I am sounding like a lazy apathetic person. This is not the case. I play an active roll in my life and in the lives of my kids. I am a good mom, I just feel like I am just getting by and wading through my life rather than flourishing and growing and being truly happy with who I am and where my place in the world is. I want more and am going out to get it.
Hope Floats
The small town in Texas is also very alluring. Being from a small town, there is a part of me that longs for that small town environment and the simpler life that goes along with it.
Sandra Bullock and Harry Connick Jr are excellent in this film and I would highly recommend it.
Grab your tissues and warm cup of tea and escape for a little while into this lovely film.
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