People, politics, and pumpkin pie . . .

Dear you:

Did you watch the latest hearings, attempts to prosecute/catch Ms. Hinton for . . . anything? All extremist motivations aside, every viewer should have been blown away by her unwavering toughness.  ELEVEN HOURS!   Eleven hours of questions she has answered before.  Eleven hours of looking at that dude with the pointy white hair.  (That would have done me in totally.) And she never lost her cool.

Cool people.  What a good thing it is to be a cool person, in politics and elsewhere.  It seems that "passion" is praised excessively these days.  I hear about passion for careers, passion for hobbies, passion for food, passion for passion.  I am getting pretty tired of passion.  I may be becoming passionately dispassionate.  I've never been a fan of lethargy or passivity, but I am looking back at a good many of my passionate choices and am not sure they were as beneficial (or FUN!) as my "cool" choices.   For example:

PASSIONATE CHOICE 1985 -  accepting a dinner-theater Christmas gig instead of amassing waitress cash in NYC.  Stupid.
CONTRASTING COOL CHOICE 2012 - subverting scamming students at St. Pete. College before my exit-move to PCB.  Smart.

But it's not about me.  It's about today's TOP FIVE cool people:

1.  Ms. Clinton (as noted)
2.  Tom Brady (performing quite well during this season's fabulous revenge tour)
3.  Anonymous writing student I taught at the University of South Florida (name withheld to protect the talented) who created the coolest stories that never featured zombies or anatomically impossible sex scenes. (Warning - if you sign up to teach a basic creative writing course, get ready for hilarious descriptions of sexual acts as imagined by the innocent.  I was especially fond of one scene -- created by a virginal writer -- who thought he knew all about his heroine's GEE spot.  No, he wasn't kidding.  He thought it was called the GEE spot due its "ah, gee, that felt good" associations.  Actually, he wasn't cool, but I do want to hand him a high score for adorable.)
4.  Anderson Cooper
5.  Justice Ginsberg (the notorious RBG)

October is winding down; all things Thanksgiving are approaching.
Yes.  Pumpkin pie is cool!  Please do not blame the pumpkin and the classic pie for all the bullshit, "passionate" products that make us nuts:  pumpkin coffee, pumpkin cake, pumpkin ice cream, pumpkin toilet paper, pumpkin tweezers, and (OMG) pumpkin spice anything.  Never mind; it isn't COOL to hate on helpless spin-off products.

Enjoy what is left of 10/2015!

Wishing you cool pleasures . . .

XO

Joyce

WE WILL HAVE SO MUCH WINNING!!!!!!

Dear you:

Syria, shootings in Oregon, flooding in the Atlantic states.  What, me worry?  Never!  I have the promise of The Donald assuring me we will have so much winning.

Winning.  I suppose that means different things to different people. My version of winning is NOT at all like Mr. T's or many of his supporters.  Break it down, "listicle" time again.

Winning according to Joyce:
1.  Gigging in enough dough to pay bills and eat well.
2.  Avoiding the trap of extrinsic motivation.  (If I do this, my department chair will love me etc.)
3.  Enjoying immunity from random opinion.  (Yes, I pretend I'm a Billboard Top 10 star when I work out on the beach.)
4.  Pretending I am immortal.  (This is only disrupted when mailings from AARP or Funeral Benefits Inc. arrive in my mailbox.)
5.  Maintaining physical and intellectual flexibility.  (I can still fall into complete 180 degree splits and can read books written by my adversaries . . . kind of.)

Winning according to Donald:
1.  Talking about my piles of dough.
2.  Manipulating people to fall into traps of extrinsic motivation.  (Don't piss Donald off.)
3.  Enjoying immunity from logic.
4.  Knowing I am immortal!
5.  Maintaining physical and intellectual weirdness.

Choose your 5 actions, from Joyce or Donald, and execute them for your own brand of WINNING!

I guess being alpha and in control is a sign of dominance (a sort of winning), and I have to hand it to Donald for achieving that . . . power.  Speaking of power, check out this clip from Trevor Noah's show compliments of Time:

http://time.com/4060432/trevor-noah-donald-trump-african-president/

Hilarious!
Frightening!
Perfect for Halloween season!

Go forth and win, baby.

XO

Your Joyce