Do Not Be Satisfied

Hello. Bonjour. The weather is quite cloudy today. I would love to run around outside, actually. In the rain. But it's not raining. I'm feeling like the tour will never come. I want to go! Travel! Explore! Take pictures! Be obnoxious! Annoy my friends! Splurge and be crazy because nobody will stop me! Eat lots of food! Drink Starbucks coffee! It's free in our hotel, and I have just now decided that I will drink some of it at least once.

Thank goodness for Spring Break. I will still be doing some reading and stuff on my own, but I have time off from choir, ballet, math class, Confirmation, newsroom 101, and other nonsense. Obviously I'm not so thrilled with the cancellation of youth activities. You know me - I'd have youth three times a week Spring Break or no.

Since there is no ballet Monday night, as mentioned above, I will get to watch the Dancing with the Stars premier! Oh yes, oh hallelujah. The rest of the season I will have to watch it from the computer. I believe the computer can be hooked into the tv, but it doesn't get as big as our screen, I don't believe. I can't wait to see all the couples dance. There will surely be surprises. Too bad Samantha's back! I so loved Drew as temporary host. Course, I loved him more as Season 2 champ. :-)

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Tuesday night at Newsroom we had a pretty busy class. We spent almost all of the time in little groups going from station to station, a definite change. This also involved changing floors multiple times. Since our little groups were traveling solo, stairs were the only option. Ha, one group found this out the hard way when they tried to be lazy and take the elevator and ended up in security! :-D Ya hafta have an i.d. to use the elevator!



My story was reviewed and corrected a second time, by a different guy. He told me several things that conflicted with what the first guy said. Grrrr. Generally I liked his corrections better, though. Either way, I think it's going to be a fine story and I know I'll be relieved when it's completed, assuming that blessed day does indeed arrive. I have scheduled one more interview for this evening so I can perhaps get a little bit more info to stick in here and there and kind of round it out. Psssrrhh, interviewing in complicated and difficult. :-P




We also got to record podcasts and vodcasts Tuesday night. Honestly I was quite stressed about this; my group seemed very unconcerned and very unwilling to do any discussing or planning beforehand. We got to go into this tiny recording studio with bumpy foam on the walls and sit around this little round table and sit there....well, talking. Into the mics. The headphones were broken, so we were denied the coolness factor of sitting there feeling like real radio people with spiffy headphones. Ha.



I would've felt much more relaxed and secure had not my stool been determined to throw me to the floor. I had to brace myself on the table the whole time to keep from swinging wildly off in a counter clockwise direction with a succession of frightened screams and the probable end result of a screwed up podcast. The world's first stainless steel bucking backless swivel chair.

Thankfully, it was quite fun and went over pretty well. Some people got off topic at the very end - I'm not overly happy about that, but hey, it was fine. The vodcasts were less fun. They sort of sprung those at us at the last minute and I had no idea what to say. I babbled on and on and made up a whole load of nonsense. There is a proverb that says something to the effect of "Better to be silent and have people think you are a fool than to open up your mouth and prove it." Obviously this is not totally practical in the given situation - I couldn't very well sit there dumbly when it was my turn to say something, but good gracious.



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So I was looking for a specific quote the other day and Googled the term "do not be satisfied." The results were quite interesting. Here are some of the phrases I found to complete that sentence:

...with the status quo

...with hearsay or with tradition or with legendary lore

...with the results of that person whose heart is not in his work

...with stories about 'Bill, from Wellington'

...with non-specific ‘vitamin injection’ therapy

...with mentioning the bare fact of your venial sins

...with what you have achieved so far

...with the slipshod recognition-knowledge of grammar of the "reading method."

...with pictures that are mediocre-have slides that show the iris at its best

...with merely providing an answer, go a little further than what is required

...to travel down the road of familiarity

...when you get to the end of the page

...until you receive all of the answers that you came for

...to just meet the expectations of each customer

...with excuses or poor performance

...with extracts that sometimes appear in annual reports

...until you can say, “Yes, yes, I can see the Lamb of God"

...by merely filling your own belly, try to appease the hunger of others too

...with the mere recitation of the "Metta Sutta"

...with being fresh, fragrant bread



Apparently, we should not be satisfied with much of anything :-)