Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)
This is our weekend bloghop, the Ten Things of Thankful, started by Lizzi Rogers and sustained by 8 remarkable hostinae. Each week, bloggers are invited to share the parts of their lives that engender a feeling of thankfulness and gratitude. As a bloghop, this, the TToT has a certain…attitude that stands out in, (an area), of the blogosphere that is, how to put this elegantly, lousy with good writers, clever ideas and excellent presentation. What quality this, bloghop-that-Lizzi-created, has is ‘community’. (I know, I know, most of you are groaning and saying to each other, “‘com mune it tee’ that’s for girls!! we’re outa here” I will say, ‘well maybe but we have a Book of Secret Rules (aka the Secret Book of Rules)’. I thought that might change your minds! More about that later. So, welcome to the TToT (or, to be more accurate, welcome to one aspect of the TToT (‘one aspect of the TToT’ motto: ‘you say you want to, like, turn off the censor and write whatever you please and still have people read your Post? You’ve come to the right place‘)
Ten things…how hard can it be? This week you’ll be enjoying reading how people present their list of ‘Ten Things’, in ways as varied as the writers who create them.
1) Una. She enjoys the snow, as the photo above makes abundantly clear.
2) I am grateful for the quirk in my personality that has created in me a pleasure center built upon the act of shoveling. (no! I’m totally serious! We all know people who derive pleasure from certain less than common activities, (…besides that), hobbies like wood carving and crochetteting or maybe arranging colored sand in intricate patterns. For such people, it a source of pleasure and satisfaction that is not derived from the direct product of their efforts, in fact, I would offer that there is some innocent life experience in their childhood years that, combined with available activities and encouragement become …fun. Well, I get that from using a shovel. Could be digging a hole in summer or shoveling the lawn in winter. (as a 13 yo, I once shoveled the snow off the backyard at my house… the entire backyard. My parents were upset.) In any event, I enjoy shoveling snow, and this is good because Una is a fairly small dog (50 lbs) and the snow this week at least 24″ worth… and so I dug some paths out into the yard so she could get to a section where there are trees and the snow was not so deep.)
3) I am hypo-grateful for the fact of the snow, but I temper this with an appreciation of the fact that it’s the end of January. In years past, we’ve had storms like the one this week in December! That makes for a long winter.( added bonus Grat: we live in a fairly rural area. It’s very windy this morning, as I write this. Not only can I hear the wind howl, but I can hear it howling in the distance… you know, you hear the growing sound of the gust as it starts in the far distance, it grows, but then (this is the cool part this morning), then the gust goes after someone else…. not me! The sound grows (as the gust approaches) but sometimes you can hear it veering off before it hits the trees around your house. See? did you hear that? like a train, very close but none of the trees surround our house (and they’re Pine Tress so they make a fairly cool sound when the wind blows, what with all the needles and such)… you know that the wind found someone else to mess with…)
4) Book of Secret Rules (aka the Secret Book of Rules) one of the features of this bloghop that makes it possible for people like me to participate, nay! be a co-hostmagnissamus of the bloghop* and participate every week with barely a hint of self-consciousness (which makes up for those horrible years spent at William Golding Junior High… trouble is, there’s no way…well, no legal way I can find some of my classmates and beat them up (or have them beat up). oh well. The Book! that’s what this Gratitude Item is about! Very Simple: we have a blog hop that asks participants to write a list of the 10 Things that they are grateful for…if for reasons beyond your control (yes, Christine, like an over-active imagination encouraged by a totally stunted sense of decorum…) you are not able to produce a list of 10 Items, you may provide an alternate list. The catch is you must cite the Book of Secret Rules (aka the Secret Book of Rules) and then everyone will be watching, so it’s not what I would call a ‘Get Out of Jail Free Card’
5) * BoSR(SBoR) chap 69 sec 14: anyone who uses a term like ‘nay!’ or ‘verily’ in an Item without resorting to a ‘lol’ to cover up for the essentially giggle-inducing phrase is entitled
6) (chap 60 sec 14.5) 2 free Items.
7) this weekend’s work will have to be listed as semi-hypo-grateful… not just the weather conditions, hell I spent several winters on the deck of a commercial fishing boat where the cold and the wind were such that the spray off the bow would turn into hail and sting like a bastard when it hit you in the face… no, it’s the stress of the work. Which, speaking only for myself, is pretty much all self-induced. Well, let me rephrase that, ‘the challenges of the work I do is the ostensible reason for stress, the unalterable fact of the matter is that I am responsible for allowing these reasons to be experienced as ‘stress’. Fortunately for me, one of the tools at my disposal for dealing with this is, Item 8: ‘ the Wakefield Doctrine’
8) I am grateful this week for the Wakefield Doctrine, both as a tool for my understanding of myself as well as a way to enjoy the day and the people in it.
9) You might think I would’ve taken advantage of the the BoSR/SBoR to jump right to Secret Rule 1.3, but I’m grateful for the fact that I did not. Instead, I think I’ll pimp the movie that I saw a couple of weeks ago. ‘Predestination’… with Ethan Hawke a new release on video. You should rent it this weekend. It is family friendly, but I suspect a lot of people will not enjoy it. It’s arguably the best ‘time travel paradox’ movie I have ever seen. Those of you with children… not sure which of the kids are clarks? try this movie out. (What? you want another movie to help identify the clarks in your family? say no more! ‘Slacker’ by Richard Linklater now, you put this movie on with a couch full of people and I guarantee that the scotts and the rogers will not last 5 minutes and the clarks will be sitting there mesmerized (with that laughsmile on their faces).
10) Even though there is still only rudimentary language developed to account for the benefit of identifying with other clarks, I am grateful for that simple and stupendous offshoot of this Wakefield Doctrine blog. That I can identify and identify with, other clarks is, simply, one of the top 5 significant events in my life (and yes, that is one of the three… jeez!)
* footnotes and such
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