Skip to main content

Oprah's land of grateful

Here we go. Feel free to steal this, which I know, I know, no one will because it is TOO LAME but I have to do it:

List 5 things you are grateful for RIGHT NOW (without thinking)
1. The Rabbit's health
2. My health
3. The Prince's health
4. The fact we have a safe place to live and can sleep tonight.
5. The fact that my family is for the most part happy.

List 5 things you would change about your situation RIGHT NOW (again without thinking)
1. Get the Rabbit into the school program where I want her.
2. Get this gig I know I would be AWESOME AT and start.
3. Get The Prince the dream job he so deserves.
4. STOP FEELING NUTS WHEN I GET SCARED.
5. Turn me into a permanent size 6 so my size 8 pants would never feel tight again.

List 5 things you would change about your SELF, right now, without thinking.
1. Make me more calm.
2. Make me appreciate what I have.
3. Make me confident in my writing.
4. Make me NEVER lose my temper with the Rabbit.
5. Make my feet callous free. (Yes, lame, but that just popped into my mind.)

List 5 things you would change about the world, right now, without thinking.
1. Get a woman in the White House today.
2. Make the ice caps stop melting.
3. Have everyone plant a tree for every year they've been alive, and take care of it.
4. Give everyone 6 weeks of mandatory vacation, and 2 years of maternity leave. Worldwide.
5. Get rid of guns. Poof. In one second.

List 5 things you are going to do today that make you smile, right now, without thinking.
1. Pick up The Rabbit at school and see her beautiful face.
2. Paint a word tree with her (where we write words on leaves and tape them up as she learns them -- until the tree is gloriously full and green.)
3. Sing The Rabbit to sleep.
4. Listen to my favorite Stevie Wonder song.
5. Talk to the Prince.

And guess what -- this didn't help.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Apologies for being incommunicado this week and hope none of you out there are too distraught not to be receiving the usual almost-daily MotV missives. The reason for the silence is that I'm up to my neck, metaphorically-speaking, in research papers for my first grad course assessment. This experience has made me realise how rigorously un-academic I am in my thinking. It has also illuminated how reliant I am on red wine in order to get through endless evenings typing furiously on my laptop, not to mention the fueling of increasingly colorful curses that I feel obliged to aim at the University's online library system which consistently refuses to spit out any of the journals I'm desperate for (I refuse to believe this is 100% due to my technical incompetence...) Oh well, if this is the price one has to pay in order to realize a long-cherished dream then it's not all that bad... No one ever said a mid-life career change would be easy. Wish me luck!

Environment

Being an expat, a favorite topic of conversation is 'where I/you want to go next?' or 'When do you plan to go home?' It's a good question. I'm not sure I want to stay in Dubai for ever, but I'm also not sure about how long I want to be here for or where else I would like to live. For almost the first time ever, I have no fixed plans apart from keeping my eyes and mind open to interesting opportunities. And as to going 'home', I have no idea where that is. Constantly moving around as a child left me with the feeling that 'home' is wherever I am right now, so in effect 'home' could be anywhere. The longest I've ever lived in one fixed place was 18 years in London, on and off, but that doesn't feel like 'home' either - I love going back to see family and friends, and it's a great place to shop, but that's about it. I have a great love for California, which is where my extended family is from (and where most of the