Nickname Important Quotes

What a terrible thing it is to botch a farewell. I am a person who believes in form, in the harmony of order. Where we can, we must give things a meaningful shape. For example - I wonder - could you tell my jumbled story in exactly one hundred chapters, not one more, not one less? I'll tell you, that's one thing I have about my nickname, the way the number runs on forever. It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse. That bungled goodbye hurts me to this day. I wish so much that I'd had one last look at him in the lifeboat, that I'd provoked him a little, so that I was on his mind. I wish I had said to him then - yes, I know, to a tiger, but still - I wish I had said, "Richard Parker, it's over. We have survived. Can you believe it? I owe you more gratitude than I can express I couldn't have done it without you. I would like to say it formally: Richard Parker, thank you. Thank you for saving my life. And now go where you must. You have known the confined freedom of a zoo most of your life; now you will know the free confinement of a jungle. I wish you all the best with it. Watch out for Man. He is not your friend. But I hope you will remember me as a friend. I will never forget you , that is certain. You will always be with me, in my heart. What is that hiss? Ah, our boat has touched sand. So farewell, Richard Parker, farewell. God be with you.

I’ll tell you, that’s one thing I hate about my nickname, the way the number runs on forever. It’s important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse.

The overwhelming consensus is that the traditions contained within the epistle can confidently be traced to James the Just. That would make James’s epistle arguably one of the most important books in the New Testament. Because one sure way of uncovering what Jesus may have believed is to determine what his brother James believed. The first thing to note about James’s epistle is its passionate concern with the plight of the poor. This, in itself, is not surprising. The traditions all paint James as the champion of the destitute and dispossessed; it is how he earned his nickname, “the Just.” The Jerusalem assembly was founded by James upon the principle of service to the poor. There is even evidence to suggest that the first followers of Jesus who gathered under James’s leadership referred to themselves collectively as “the poor.

For example--I wonder--could you tell my jumbled story in exactly one hundred chapters, not one more, not one less? I'll tell you, that's one thing I hate about my nickname, the way that number runs on forever. It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go.

Our restaurant fostered a sense of camaraderie in a number of ways besides sharing the same nickname of 'chef.' Initially, we bonded through training. Once we opened, we worked in teams each night, meaning that we not only knew our colleagues well, we depended on them. Most importantly, we all had 'family meal' together every night, just like President Bush recommended to all families so that their children would have good values and grow up to be gun-toting, pro-life, pro-death, gas-guzzling, warmongering, monolingual, homophobic, wiretapped, Bible-thumping, genetically engineered, stem-cell harboring, abstinent creationists. Oops, I think I just lost all of my red state readers. To make up for it, I'll let you lose my ballot.

Here is one of the most important things I can tell you: confidence and resiliency when it comes to accepting your body has nothing to do with your body at all. They have everything to do with actively working toward becoming the best person you can be.4

What a terrible thing it is to botch a farewell. I am a person who believes in form, in the harmony of order. Where we can, we must give things a meaningful shape. For example - I wonder - could you tell my jumbled story in exactly one hundred chapters, not one more, not one less? I'll tell you, that's one thing I have about my nickname, the way the number runs on forever. It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse. That bungled goodbye hurts me to this day. I wish so much that I'd had one last look at him in the lifeboat, that I'd provoked him a little, so that I was on his mind. I wish I had said to him then - yes, I know, to a tiger, but still - I wish I had said, "Richard Parker, it's over. We have survived. Can you believe it? I owe you more gratitude than I can express I couldn't have done it without you.

I'll tell you, that's one thing I hate about my nickname, the way the number runs on forever. It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let it go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said, but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse. That bungled goodbye hurts me to this day.

tumbled into love, into ecstasy and trust, joy and peace without horizon, without time, beyond words. We turned our backs on the world to invent and build our own. We thrilled each other with pretended violence, and we cosseted and babied each other too, gave each other nicknames, had a private language. We were beyond embarrassment. We gave and received and permitted everything. We were heroic. We believed we stood on a summit no one else, not in life, not in all poetry, had ever climbed. Our love was so fine and grand, it seemed to us a universal principle. It was a system of ethics, a means of relating to others that was so fundamental that the world had overlooked it somehow. When we lay on the narrow bed face to face, looked deep into each other’s eyes and talked, we brought our selves into being. She took my hands and kissed them and for the first time in my life I wasn’t ashamed of them. Our families, which we described to each other in detail, at last made sense to us. We loved them urgently, despite all the difficulties of the past. Same with our best, most important friends. We could redeem everyone we knew. Our love was for the good of the world. Trudy and I had never talked or listened with such attention. Our lovemaking was an extension of our talking, our talking of our lovemaking.

Sometimes, it feels like having a wild thing in my grasp when she's with me. She's just like her nickname, ready to take off with the first gust of wind. I've never wanted to earn trust before Sloane. I've never cared about keeping it on a personal level, not for anyone but my brothers. And suddenly, Sloane's trust is one of the most important things in the world to me. I know if I lose it, I'll never get it back. And that scares the shit out of me.

there is something about watching a person slowly disappear—their energy, then their color, then their body—that pushes you, unwillingly, to the edge of an emotional canyon and forces you to look, to see the vastness held within it and realize that you’ve explored so little. That life isn’t infinite but is monumental, and if you don’t start exploring now, you are going to miss some of the most important sights. The feeling of being consumed with grief at the idea of losing someone you’ve known for so long yet hardly understand… that feeling changes you.

From Sister by ROSAMUND LUPTON    The rain hammered down onto your coffin, pitter-patter; ‘Pitter-patter, pitter-patter, I hear raindrops’; I was five and singing it to you, just born. Your coffin reached the bottom of the monstrous hole. And a part of me went down into the muddy earth with you and lay down next to you and died with you. Then Mum stepped forwards and took a wooden spoon from her coat pocket. She loosened her fingers and it fell on top of your coffin. Your magic wand. And I threw the emails I sign ‘lol’. And the title of older sister. And the nickname Bee. Not grand or important to anyone else, I thought, this bond that we had. Small things. Tiny things. You knew that I didn’t make words out of my alphabetti spaghetti but I gave you my vowels so you could make more words out of yours. I knew that your favourite colour used to be purple but then became bright yellow; (‘Ochre’s the arty word, Bee’) and you knew mine was orange, until I discovered that taupe was more sophisticated and you teased me for that. You knew that my first whimsy china animal was a cat (you lent me 50p of your pocket money to buy it) and that I once took all my clothes out of my school trunk and hurled them around the room and that was the only time I had something close to a tantrum. I knew that when you were five you climbed into bed with me every night for a year. I threw everything we had together - the strong roots and stems and leaves and beautiful soft blossoms of sisterhood - into the earth with you. And I was left standing on the edge, so diminished by the loss, that I thought I could no longer be there. All I was allowed to keep for myself was missing you. Which is what? The tears that pricked the inside of my face, the emotion catching at the top of my throat, the cavity in my chest that was larger than I am. Was that all I had now? Nothing else from twenty-one years of loving you. Was the feeling that all is right with the world, my world, because you were its foundations, formed in childhood and with me grown into adulthood - was that to be replaced by nothing? The ghastliness of nothing. Because I was nobody’s sister now. I saw Dad had been given a handful of earth. But as he held out his hand above your coffin he couldn’t unprise his fingers. Instead, he put his hand into his pocket, letting the earth fall there and not onto you. He watched as Father Peter threw the first clod of earth instead and broke apart, splintering with the pain of it. I went to him and took his earth-stained hand in mine, the earth gritty between our soft palms. He looked at me with love. A selfish person can still love someone else, can’t they? Even when they’ve hurt them and let them down. I, of all people, should understand that. Mum was silent as they put earth over your coffin. An explosion in space makes no sound at all.

Suddenly a violent noise leaped at them from no source that he could identify. He gasped in terror at what sounded like a man trying to gargle while fighting off a pack of wolves. “Shush!” said Ford. “Listen, it might be important.” “Im … important?” “It’s the Vogon captain making an announcement on the tannoy.” “You mean that’s how the Vogons talk?” “Listen!” “But I can’t speak Vogon!” “You don’t need to. Just put this fish in your ear.” Ford, with a lightning movement, clapped his hand to Arthur’s ear, and he had the sudden sickening sensation of the fish slithering deep into his aural tract. Gasping with horror he scrabbled at his ear for a second or so, but then slowly turned goggle-eyed with wonder. He was experiencing the aural equivalent of looking at a picture of two black silhouetted faces and suddenly seeing it as a picture of a white candlestick. Or of looking at a lot of colored dots on a piece of paper which suddenly resolve themselves into the figure six and mean that your optician is going to charge you a lot of money for a new pair of glasses. He was still listening to the howling gargles, he knew that, only now it had somehow taken on the semblance of perfectly straightforward English. This is what he heard … * Ford Prefect’s original name is only pronounceable in an obscure Betel-geusian dialect, now virtually extinct since the Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster of Gal./Sid./Year 03758 which wiped out all the old Praxibetel communities on Betelgeuse Seven. Ford’s father was the only man on the entire planet to survive the Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster, by an extraordinary coincidence that he was never able satisfactorily to explain. The whole episode is shrouded in deep mystery: in fact no one ever knew what a Hrung was nor why it had chosen to collapse on Betelgeuse Seven particularly. Ford’s father, magnanimously waving aside the clouds of suspicion that had inevitably settled around him, came to live on Betelgeuse Five, where he both fathered and uncled Ford; in memory of his now dead race he christened him in the ancient Praxibetel tongue. Because Ford never learned to say his original name, his father eventually died of shame, which is still a terminal disease in some parts of the Galaxy. The other kids at school nicknamed him Ix, which in the language of Betelgeuse Five translates as “boy who is not able satisfactorily to explain what a Hrung is, nor why it should choose to collapse on Betelgeuse Seven.

While the above term may seem too gimmicky for a subheading in an official file, it’s truly the best word to describe the strange relationship dynamic between Tam and Keefe Sencen. The two boys are decidedly not friends—in fact, reports suggest they disliked each other almost immediately (and the nicknames they use for each other range from the clever and witty to downright mean-spirited). Some suspect it’s because Tam violated Keefe’s privacy and read Keefe’s shadowvapor without his permission when they first met, while others would argue it’s because Keefe refused to have his shadowvapor read as though he had something to hide. Others still might suggest it’s actually because the two have quite a bit in common—but prefer to think of themselves as uniquely alone in their challenges and principles. Whatever the cause, it’s doubtful that Tam and Keefe will ever truly be friends. But it’s important to note that they have never appeared to truly be enemies, either—a fact that became increasingly vital when Tam was taken by the Neverseen and Keefe’s mom (Lady Gisela) forced him to use his ability on her son. Had there been true ill will between the boys, Tam wouldn’t have attempted to warn Keefe about what his mom was planning—and Keefe would’ve tried to harm Tam in their final showdown.

We are praying to the God of our people, whom we call Hashem, literally, “the Name.” The true name for God is devastatingly holy and evocative; to utter it would represent a death wish, so we have safe nicknames for him instead: the Holy Name, the One, the Only, the Creator, the Destroyer, the Overseer, the King of All Kings, the One True Judge, the Merciful Father, Master of the Universe, O Great Architect, a long list of names for all his attributes. For the sake of this divinity I must surrender myself each morning, body and soul; for this God, my teachers say, I must learn silence so that only his voice can be heard through me. God lives in my soul, and I must spend my life scrubbing my soul clean of any trace of sin so that it deserves to host his presence. Repentance is a daily chore; at each morning prayer session we repent in advance for the sins we will commit that day. I look around at the others, who must sincerely believe in their inherent evil, as they are shamelessly crying and wailing to God to help them expunge the yetzer hara, or evil inclination, from their consciousness. Although I talk to God, it is not through prayer. I talk to him in my mind, and even I will admit that I do not come to God humbly, as I should. I talk to him frankly, as I would to a friend, and I’m constantly asking him for favors. Still, I feel like God and I are on pretty good terms, relatively speaking. This morning, as everyone sways passionately around me, I stand calmly in the sea of young girls, asking God to make this day a bearable one. I’m very easy to pick on. The teachers know I’m not important, that no one will defend me. I’m not a rabbi’s daughter, so when they get angry, I’m the perfect scapegoat. I make sure never to look up from my siddur during prayer, but Chavie Halberstam, the rabbi’s daughter, can elbow her friend Elky to point out the toilet paper stuck to the teacher’s shoe and it’s as if nothing happened. If I so much as smirk, I’m singled out immediately. This is why I need God on my side; I have no one else to stick up for me.

Are you interested in medical marijuana but have no idea what it is? In recent years, there is a growing cry for the legalization of cannabis because of its proven health benefits. Read on as we try to look into the basics of the drug, what it really does to the human body, and how it can benefit you. Keep in mind that medical marijuana is not for everyone, so it’s important that you know how you’re going to be using it before you actually use it. What is Marijuana? Most likely, everyone has heard of marijuana and know what it is. However, many people hold misconceptions of marijuana because of inaccurate news and reporting, which has led to the drug being demonized—even when numerous studies have proven the health benefits of medical marijuana when it is used in moderation. (Even though yes, weed is also used as a recreational drug.) First and foremost, medical marijuana is a plant. The drug that we know of is made of its shredded leaves and flowers of the cannabis sativa or indica plant. Whatever its strain or form, all types of cannabis alter the mind and have some degree of psychoactivity. The plant is made of chemicals, with tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) being the most powerful and causing the biggest impact on the brain. How is Medical Marijuana Used? There are several ways medical weed is used, depending on the user’s need, convenience and preference. The most common ways are in joint form, and also using bongs and vaporizers. But with its growing legalization, we’re seeing numerous forms of cannabis consumption methods being introduced (like oils, edibles, drinks and many more). ● Joint – Loose marijuana leaves are rolled into a cigarette. Sometimes, it’s mixed with tobacco to cut the intensity of the cannabis. ● Bong – This is a large water pipe that heats weed into smoke, which the user then inhales. ● Vaporizer – Working like small bongs, this is a small gadget that makes it easier to bring and use weed practically anywhere. What’s Some Common Medical Marijuana Lingo? We hear numerous terms from people when it comes to describing medical marijuana, and this list continually grows. An example of this is the growing number of marijuana nicknames which include pot, grass, reefer, Mary Jane, dope, skunk, ganja, boom, chronic and herb among many others. Below are some common marijuana terms and what they really mean. ● Bong – Water pipe that allows for weed to be inhaled ● Blunt – Hollowed-out cigar with the tobacco replaced with weed ● Hash – Mix of medical weed and tobacco ● Joint – Rolled cigarette-like way to consume medical cannabis How Does It Feel to be High? When consumed in moderation, weed’s common effects include a heightened sense of euphoria and well-being. You’ll most likely talk and laugh more. At its height, the high creates a feeling of pensive dreaminess that wears off and becomes sleepiness. In a group setting, there are commonly feelings of exaggerated physical and emotional sensitivity as well as strong feelings of camaraderie. Medical marijuana also has a direct impact on a person’s speech patterns, which will get slower. There will be an impairment in your ability to carry out conversations. Cannabis also affects short-term memory. The usual high that one gets from cannabis can last for about two hours; when you overindulge, it can last for up to 12 hours. Is Using Medical Marijuana Safe? Medical cannabis is scientifically proven to be safer compared to alcohol or nicotine. Marijuana is slowly being legalized around the world because of its numerous health benefits, particularly among people suffering from mental illness like depression, anxiety and stress. It also has physical benefits, like helping in managing pain and the treatment of glaucoma and cancer.

The reason for her nickname is lost. The problem is that we don’t know what eighteenth-century sailors understood by ‘saucy’; if it’s similar to how we understand it, it may have had very important subtle variations.

I believe North Carolina is going to be a very important place in holding positive energy for this part of the world as we go through our next evolution on a body, mind, spirit, and planetary level. I believe that North Carolina is evolving into a light center for the United States. I see the symbolism with the lighthouses all along the North Carolina coast, shining brightly. They remind me of the great lighthouse in Alexandria, Egypt, where the world’s greatest library once existed. On the other end of the state lie the mystical Blue Ridge Mountains, one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world, and with vortices in the area spinning with so much energy in cities like Asheville that the area has been nicknamed the Sedona of the South, in reference to the vortices and spiritual energy

She haunted many a low resort, Round the grimy road of Tottenham Court. She flitted around the no man’s land From The Rising Sun to The Friend At Hand And the postman sighed as he scratched his head You really would have thought she ought to be dead And who would ever suppose that that Was Grizabella The Glamour Cat. And that was not all. There was a letter from Tom Eliot to his publisher Geoffrey Faber about an event which brought all the Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats together who then ascended to the “Heaviside Layer” in a great big air balloon. There was even a couplet to go with it: “Up, up, up, past the Russell Hotel, / Up, up, up, to the Heaviside Layer.” So Eliot himself had an idea for a bigger structure for these poems, very vague, but it was there. I knew then that I had the bare bones of a stage musical. Most importantly Grizabella the Glamour Cat gave me a tragic character, a character who you would really care about. I asked Cameron and Gillie to join Valerie and Matthew, and the excitement was tangible. There were other poems too, the story of a parrot called Billy McCaw, who lived on the bar of an East End pub. There was the saga of a Yorkshire terrier called Little Tom Pollicle which was apparently Eliot’s nickname, and a long poem about a man in white spats who meets a casual diner in a pub called the Princess Louise and starts talking about “this’s and thats and Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats.” I asked Valerie what the words “Pollicle” and “Jellicle” meant. She explained it was Eliot’s private joke about how the British upper class slurred the words “poor little dogs” and “dear little cats.” She also revealed that Eliot intended the “Princess Louise” poem, as we came to call it, to be the preface of a book about dogs and cats, but in the end cats prevailed. “The Awefull Battle of the

You know, Barry,” she said (that’s the nickname she and my grandparents used for me when I was growing up, often shortened to “Bar,” pronounced “Bear”), “there are people in the world who think only about themselves. They don’t care what happens to other people so long as they get what they want. They put other people down to make themselves feel important. “Then there are people who do the opposite, who are able to imagine how others must feel, and make sure that they don’t do things that hurt people. “So,” she said, looking me squarely in the eye. “Which kind of person do you want to be?

What was I to do, after sailing the seven seas now that we moved to 33 Van Wart Avenue, on the Scarsdale line of White Plains, NY. Like they say, money doesn’t grow on trees, so it was up to me to find a job. The economy wasn’t all that great and the best I could do was to find a commission job selling home fire detection units. One of the senior salesmen took me under his wing and showed me the ropes. The most important part of the pitch was to emphasize the importance of the fire detection unit and how, after declining our product a family had a fire in their home. The hapless husband was found stretched across the bed where he obviously died attempting to reach the telephone, while his family succumbed to the super-heated poisonous gasses and raging flames. It all could have been prevented if only they would have bought the fire detection unit when it was offered. I hated cold calling and selling something to people that they couldn’t afford was not in my nature. I wasn’t like my brother who could lure a hungry dog off the back of a meat wagon! It wasn’t that I didn’t try, because the more often I told the story the worse it got! I could just tell that the people I talked to knew that I was full of shXt and all I wanted to do was get out of there, although one of the sales rules was that you stayed until the people invited you to leave at least three times. For every rebuttal I had an answer and for every financial problem I had a solution, to put them even further into debt. In the end I would come home with my tail between my legs and with Ursula, watched the midnight horror show with John Zacherle. Dick Clark, a friend, gave Zacherle his nickname, "The Cool Ghoul," and for us it was television at it’s very best in the 1960’s.

You know, Barry,” she said (that’s the nickname she and my grandparents used for me when I was growing up, often shortened to “Bar,” pronounced “Bear”), “there are people in the world who think only about themselves. They don’t care what happens to other people so long as they get what they want. They put other people down to make themselves feel important. “Then there are people who do the opposite, who are able to imagine how others must feel, and make sure that they don’t do things that hurt people. “So,” she said, looking me squarely in the eye. “Which kind of person do you want to be?” I felt lousy. As she intended it to, her question stayed with me for a long time.

From the Bridge” The Importance of History Not all that many years ago the Importance of history would have been a “no brainer!” People understood that there was very little new under the sun, and history was a good barometer to the future. “Those that fail to heed history are doomed to repeat it, “was an adage frequently heard. It gave us a perspective by which to stabilize our bearings and allowed us to find one of the few ways by which we could understand who we are. The myth that George Washington, not being able to lie, admitted to chopping down his father’s favorite cherry tree helped us create a moral compass. Abraham Lincoln’s moniker “Honest Abe,” took root when he worked as a young store clerk in New Salem, IL. The name stuck before he became a lawyer or a politician. His writings show that he valued honesty and in 1859 when he ran for the presidency the nickname became his campaign slogan. However, apparently ”Honest Abe” did lie about whether he was negotiating with the South to end the war and also knowingly concealed some of the most lethal weapons ever devised during the Civil War." These however, were very minor infractions when compared to what we are now expected to believe from our politicians. Since World War II the pace of life has moved faster than ever and may actually have overrun our ability to understand the significance and value of our own honesty. We no longer turn to our past for guidance regarding the future; rather we look into our future in terms of what we want and how we will get it. We have developed to the point that we are much smarter than our ancestors and no longer need their morality and guidance. What we don’t know we frequently fabricate and in most cases, no one picks up on it and if they do, it really doesn’t seem to matter. In short the past has become outdated, obsolete and therefore has become largely irrelevant to us. Being less informed about our past is not the result of a lack of information or education, but of ambivalence and indifference. Perhaps history belongs to the ages but not to us. To a great extent we as a people really do not believe that history matters very much, if at all. My quote “History is not owned solely by historians. It is part of everyone’s heritage,” was written for the opening page of my award winning book “The Exciting Story of Cuba.” Not only is it the anchor holding our Ship of State firmly secure, it is the root of our very being. Yes, history is important. In centuries past this statement would have been self-evident. Our predecessors devoted much time and effort in teaching their children history and it helped provide the foundation to understanding who they were. It provided them a reference whereby they could set their own life’s goals. However society has, to a great extent, turned its back on the past. We now live in an era where the present is most important and our future is being built on shifting sand. We, as a people are presently engaged in a struggle for economic survival and choose to think of ourselves in terms of where wind and tide is taking us, rather than where we came from. We can no longer identify with our ancestors, thus they are no longer relevant. Their lives were so different from our own that they no longer can shed any light on our experience or existence. Therefore, in the minds of many of us, the past no longer has the value it once had nor do we give it the credence it deserves. As in war, the truth is the first victim; however this casualty threatens the very fabric of our being. When fact and fiction are interchanged to satisfy the moment, the bedrock of history in undermined. When we depend on the truth to structure our future, it is vital that it be based on truthful history and the honesty of those who write it. It is a crime without penalty when our politicians tell us lies. In fact they are often shamefully rewarded; encouraging them to become even more blatant in the lies they tell.

Meditation + Mental Strength An emotion is our evolved biology predicting the future impact of a current event. In modern settings, it’s usually exaggerated or wrong. Why is meditation so powerful? Your breath is one of the few places where your autonomic nervous system meets your voluntary nervous system. It’s involuntary, but you can also control it. I think a lot of meditation practices put an emphasis on the breath because it is a gateway into your autonomic nervous system. There are many, many cases in the medical and spiritual literature of people controlling their bodies at levels that should be autonomous. Your mind is such a powerful thing. What’s so unusual about your forebrain sending signals to your hindbrain and your hindbrain routing resources to your entire body? You can do it just by breathing. Relaxed breathing tells your body you’re safe. Then, your forebrain doesn’t need as many resources as it normally does. Now, the extra energy can be sent to your hindbrain, and it can reroute those resources to the rest of your body. I’m not saying you can beat whatever illness you have just because you activated your hindbrain. But you’re devoting most of the energy normally required to care about the external environment to the immune system. I highly recommend listening to the Tim Ferriss’s podcast with Wim Hof. He is a walking miracle. Wim’s nickname is the Ice Man. He holds the world record for the longest time spent in an ice bath and swimming in freezing cold water. I was very inspired by him, not only because he’s capable of super-human physical feats, but because he does it while being incredibly kind and happy—which is not easy to accomplish. He advocates cold exposure, because he believes people are too separate from their natural environment. We’re constantly clothed, fed, and warm. Our bodies have lost touch with the cold. The cold is important because it can activate the immune system. So, he advocates taking long ice baths. Being from the Indian subcontinent, I’m strongly against the idea of ice baths. But Wim inspired me to give cold showers a try. And I did so by using the Wim Hof breathing method. It involves hyperventilating to get more oxygen into your blood, which raises your core temperature. Then, you can go into the shower. The first few cold showers were hilarious because I’d slowly ease myself in, wincing the entire way. I started about four or five months ago. Now, I turn the shower on full-blast, and then I walk right in. I don’t give myself any time to hesitate. As soon as I hear the voice in my head telling me how cold it’s going to be, I know I have to walk in. I learned a very important lesson from this: most of our suffering comes from avoidance. Most of the suffering from a cold shower is the tip-toeing your way in. Once you’re in, you’re in. It’s not suffering. It’s just cold. Your body saying it’s cold is different than your mind saying it’s cold. Acknowledge your body saying it’s cold. Look at it. Deal with it. Accept it, but don’t mentally suffer over it. Taking a cold shower for two minutes isn’t going to kill you. Having a cold shower helps you re-learn that lesson every morning. Now hot showers are just one less thing I need out of life. [2] Meditation is intermittent fasting for the mind. Too much sugar leads to a heavy body, and too many distractions lead to a heavy mind. Time spent undistracted and alone, in self-examination, journaling, meditation, resolves the unresolved and takes us from mentally fat to fit.

Though Illinois is nicknamed the Prairie State, not much prairie actually remains. Today, only 2,500 acres of virgin tallgrass prairie still exist in Illinois, just 0.01 percent of its former 20-million acre range. It is an imperiled landscape.

And that was not all. There was a letter from Tom Eliot to his publisher Geoffrey Faber about an event which brought all the Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats together who then ascended to the “Heaviside Layer” in a great big air balloon. There was even a couplet to go with it: “Up, up, up, past the Russell Hotel, / Up, up, up, to the Heaviside Layer.” So Eliot himself had an idea for a bigger structure for these poems, very vague, but it was there. I knew then that I had the bare bones of a stage musical. Most importantly Grizabella the Glamour Cat gave me a tragic character, a character who you would really care about. I asked Cameron and Gillie to join Valerie and Matthew, and the excitement was tangible. There were other poems too, the story of a parrot called Billy McCaw, who lived on the bar of an East End pub. There was the saga of a Yorkshire terrier called Little Tom Pollicle which was apparently Eliot’s nickname, and a long poem about a man in white spats who meets a casual diner in a pub called the Princess Louise and starts talking about “this’s and thats and Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats.” I asked Valerie what the words “Pollicle” and “Jellicle” meant. She explained it was Eliot’s private joke about how the British upper class slurred the words “poor little dogs” and “dear little cats.” She also revealed that Eliot intended the “Princess Louise” poem, as we came to call it, to be the preface of a book about dogs and cats, but in the end cats prevailed. “The Awefull Battle of the

When we first started dating, he introduced me to all his friends and colleagues as his little firecracker. That's what he started calling me after our third date, when he brought me to a Redskins party at his friend Eric's place. Eric had decided to make buffalo chili, but, in what became clear to both me and everyone else at the party, he had no idea what he was doing. Two hours into the party, after all of us had blown through the bags of tortilla chips and pretzels, Eric was still chopping red peppers. Determined not to let a room of fifteen people go hungry, I rolled up my sleeves, marched into the kitchen, and grabbed my knife. "Okay, Bobby Flay," I said as I wielded my knife. "Time to get this show on the road." I chopped and minced and crushed at rapid-fire speed, and in no time, dinner was served. "Get a load of this firecracker," Eric said as he watched me work my magic. After that, the name sort of stuck. For a while, the nickname seemed like a good thing. Every time I would rail against fad diets or champion the importance of sustainable agriculture or lament the lack of food options in inner cities, Adam would laugh and say, "That's my little firecracker." He made me feel special, as if I were a vital part of his life. His parents were the only people from whom he seemed to hide me, and though it bothered me a little, I understood. I was the anti-Sandy. That's what made me attractive. But he hasn't called me his little firecracker in what feels like months now, and lately I feel as if he's hiding me from everyone. When did this little firecracker become a grenade?

Smuttley goes on and on about the importance of making friends at a new school and exploring new options and new territories, not being afraid of change. Like how he got completely impulsive and decided today's hour-long appointment would take place outside his office. Bad boy Smuttley. That's what I'm gonna start calling him in my head; it's way better than the nicknames the other kids use.

Mugwump” Republicans (their nickname a mangled version of a Native American word meaning “important person”)

It was a time of men in silk top hats and women in elegant dresses at one end of the social spectrum, and of landless, impoverished peasants at the other. It was Mexico’s version of the Gilded Age, guided by an administration in thrall to French positivist ideas of the importance of quantifiable progress—no matter how pseudoscientific the instruments for measuring it were—giving rise to the nickname Científicos (scientists) for government ministers.

When he used the nickname, I felt like the most important person in the room - or in this case, parking lot.