The Secret to Getting Out of Hell

One television show that I enjoy watching is the Ghost Whisperer. If you’ve never seen it or heard of it before, it is a show starring Jennifer Love Hewitt as Melinda Gordon, a woman who can see ghosts. In the show, people who die fail to crossover and end up stuck on Earth. Melinda helps these Earth bound spirits, as she calls them, resolve their issues so they can be at peace. The show always makes me cry. I don’t really know why. It just does.

One episode of the show really touched me. The owner of a mortuary was being tortured by his past. The man had fallen on hard times and when his furnace broke he was unable to get it fixed. To save his business, he told families that he cremated the bodies of their loved ones but in reality he dumped them into a pond in the woods. The ghosts of those people were trapped on Earth because of their anger over what he did to them.

When we meet the mortician in the show he is dying of cancer and is terrified. He can feel the presence of the ghosts waiting for him to die so they can punish him for what he did. Eventually, he does die and as he expected the ghosts start torturing him.

The Act of Creation

I believe that anything in life, if placed in the proper context, can become a life lesson. After about four and a half hours of organizing my computer, I decided to take a break and look for desktop wallpapers to go with my, now, sparkling clean and organized computer space. As I’m making my way through the Google Image Search, I come upon a YouTube video of an artist creating a picture of Arwen and Aragorn.

It was an enlightening experience watching this video. Most people, including myself, take for granted the things that exist. Things are just automagically there when we want/need them. We fail to appreciate the time and effort it takes to “materialize” these things.

How to Break Bad Habits

Previously, I wrote about a bad habit of mine where I was literally sleeping my life away. I was always late to work because I would sleep past the threshold of time when I needed to get up and ready. Most times I would wear a colorful scarf on my head and skip putting on makeup just so I could make it to work at a reasonable “lateness”. After work, I would vegetate in front of the television or aimlessly surf the internet before going to bed. On my days off I would take long naps. I estimate that I slept between ten to sixteen hours a day and would still be tired.

By December of 2007, I began to wage war against my apathetic self and the first place I attacked was my poor sleeping habits. I imposed a maximum sleeping time restriction of eight hours. Afternoon naps were forbidden. I set a bed time and an awake time that had to be kept without exception.

Ways to Rekindle Your Self-Motivation

Last week, a co-worker of mine confided in me that she wanted to quit. The main problem was that this was a second job for her; one she had gotten to help pay off the stack of bills piled up on her kitchen table. Her goal was to pay off her debt so she could get a better interest rate when she refinanced her home but the struggle of working two jobs had pretty much destroyed her self-motivation. She didn’t like working two jobs but she wanted to preserve her credit score.

I didn’t know what to say to her. Unfortunately, I’m one of those people who only think of something good to say after the fact. This time, though, I was in luck. Our shifts overlapped and after about a half an hour of thinking about her situation, I presented her with my brilliant solution that would rekindle her self-motivation.