Spiritual explorations and common sense

When I spoke of silence and friendship before, my focus was on those things that you cannot speak about with a friend that ultimately break the friendship. There is another kind of silence that is acceptable, though sometimes uncomfortable, to me, and that is the kind of silence where you hold your tongue. Granted, there [...]

I play MMOs—massive, multi-player online games. Often in an MMO, you adventure together with other people who are also playing. And an essential part of adventuring is getting loot—items, clothing, accessories, weapons, and so on. In most games, everyone in your adventure party gets to say whether they need the item that drops, or whether they would [...]

Although it takes a very perceptive person to notice, I am very shy, so when people look in my direction, my first impulse is to hide, which is most easily accomplished by looking away. But I know that if I shyly look away when someone looks in my direction, it can be misinterpreted as a kind [...]

When we buy impulsively, we may end up regretting the purchase. It might be more money than we really wanted to spend on that item, or we might find we don’t like that item as much as we thought we would, or we find that we could have gotten it for less somewhere else—sometimes a [...]

Everyone has a set of guidelines, conscious or not, about friendship—what friendship is, what kinds of behavior are acceptable, what kinds of traits a good friend has. Those guidelines usually allow for imperfections as well—after all, none of us is 100% compatible, and we all make mistakes. Along those lines, I once told a tarot card reader [...]

I wish I didn’t have this advice to give. I love going to a movie theater and watching a movie on the big screen. But nowadays, at $10 a ticket or more, and paying for three people, I think long and hard before I go see a movie in a theater. Instead, I wait until [...]

The other night, my partner and I were accosted in a parking lot by a young woman who gave a good song and dance about how she and her female cousin were out of gas and needed to get back to Vacaville (a two-hour drive away). Could we spare anything? Anything at all would help. She gave just enough details to make [...]

I’d like to think that everyone is already making this a habit, but experience has taught me otherwise. You can save a lot of money by turning off your lights when you leave a room. Or the television, or stereo, or other electronic device. Or powering down your computer instead of leaving it on when [...]