People From Louisiana

"Meetings handled well reduce email. Email handled well reduces meetings."

"Organizing without first capturing & clarifying what needs organizing is simply rearranging your angst."

"The greater your confidence w/how to achieve control & focus, as needed, the wilder & crazier you can be."

"Are you overwhelmed pulling weeds, when you really just need to replant the garden?"

"Collect, process, organize & review what has your attention, so you can stop half-trying to be doing all that, constantly."

"My daily meta-map lists: events coming up; major projects for me; emerging interests; my accountabilities."

"The purpose of a purpose? Tunes you to meaningful things you wouldn't be aware of, otherwise."

"Staying in control daily, weekly, & yearly requires different things for each. Handling one doesn't handle the others."

"Great question to ask, to relax: What should I consider right now, decide what, and let go?"

"Using your head to manage your life = creativity constipation."

"The present-ness demanded by a crisis is possible w/out crisis. Understand the keys to appropriate engagement. GTD."

"If you're appropriately engaged w/your life, you don't need more time. If you're not, more time won't help."

"What maps do you need to review, to see where you are & what to do next? Core to self-management systems."

"Appropriate focus on the right stuff gives the freedom to not have to focus on anything, on a regular basis."

"I have sinned against you, my Lord, and I would ask that your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God's forgetfulness, never to be remembered against me anymore."

"We were never tragedies, we were emergencies. You call 911. Tell 'em I'm having a fantastic time."

"Forgiveness is for anyone who needs safe passage through my mind."

"It was not my intention to make such a production of the emptiness between us, playing tuba on the tombstone of a soprano to try to keep some dead singer's perspective alive. It's just that I could have swore you had sung me a love song back there; and that you meant it."

"Forgiveness is the release of all hope for a better past."

"If we were created in God's image, then when God was a child he smushed fire ants with his fingertips and avoided tough questions."

"There are moments of clarity daily. They open me up with a breath and keep me calm. They feed me the answers. And they hold me lovingly. They are gospelstiches. My childish ass has got to let them heal. This feud I’m having with myself isn’t even original. But it is thick and rooted. Here’s to today, slowing down, suspending judgment, and breast strokes through chaos."

"Theses moments – as in a quote I read about life somewhere – are not a puzzle to be solved, but a moment to be lived. Just savor them when they happen. Call them coincidence. Call the synchronicity. Call them anything you want but, at the very least, savor them."

"I keep forgetting to put focus on my to-do list. I keep forgetting to wander and have fun. I know I’m transparent but my insecurities are in all the right places, so go ahead, have a look."

"He's got a lead brain. It's a battle magnet. He carries it around by the guilt straps...don't laugh, you didn't see the size of the blizzard that birthed him."

"Listen, if you're from Arizona I'm not making fun of your home. I'm making fun of you for gathering there and building a community in an oven. Smooth move."

"All these kids you can't seem to make any sense of would stop holding you so far off the edge of your seats if you'd start holding yourselves to the promises you make. We know you're not perfect because we're not. And I know I ain't perfect. But I believe I was meant to be."

"Dear Angry Older People, over 21-ish, anyone who considers themselves an adult, still bitter: Next time you're wondering what wrong with kids today, you might wanna check the examples you've been giving us to work with."

"The truth is I am a perfect part of the exact point at which all individual human beings meet and the spectrum of voices weaving themselves in between and screaming 'every sick thought you've ever had and every twisted feeling you've ever felt are what make this painting complete.'"

"If we could all rephrase the question from "What was your most embarrassing moment?" to "What was your most embarrassing year?" Then I might be able to give you an honest answer."

"But my father he didn’t read moon, he didn’t speak moon, and he didn’t write moon. So there was no letter found next to his body in the garage when he chose to leave this place on purpose without saying where he was goin’ or why. There are still days you can catch me tape-recording eternal silence and playing it backwards for an empty room just so I can listen to his dying wish. Shh."

"Jordan tattoos the words "forgive me" in thick black letters down the inside of his arm so that when he looks at his wrist he will remember not to hate himself so much. What he keeps forgetting is that there is life after survival."

"If you think being dysfuncted and damaged, strapped to your baggage, dirty, ruined and hurt like critical, cynical, scathing, if you're lost or have come up missing, scarred and scared (or pretending you aren't), when you think that's all you've got, it's not. The sadness you wear around like a trophy is intriguing at most, but it's miserable, and about as original as a frat boy with a visor cap. So step up."

"A waste is a nine-year-old boy playing catch with the roof of his garage who already understands that his existence makes for the perfect insult- gay. "You're so gay" a.k.a. stupid a.k.a. dumb a.k.a. wrong. Do you have any idea how gross it feels to hide inside the pile of lies it takes to make you, Sweet Angel, comfortable?"

"We are the fed up grass roots movement of goose flesh, hell bent on living this one life by the way we feel our spines, saying what we mean, refusing to allow the few to preach to the many when it is the many who need to be hearing eachother."

"This poem may have meant nothing to you but I am confident that tonight my taking the time to actually write out my anger instead of acting on it has saved the life of at least eleven people in parking enforcement."

"Proportion is all; and, in sports at school, I lost it by surrendering to the awful significance of my self-consciousness. Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people."

"For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love."

"Living in the world as a cripple allows you to see more clearly the crippled hearts of some people whose bodies are whole and sound. All of us, from time to time, suffer this crippling. Some suffer it daily and nightly; and while most of us, nearly all of us, have compassion and love in our hearts, we cannot of will not see these barely visible wounds of other human beings, and so cannot or will not pick up the telephone or travel to someone’s house or write a note or make some other seemingly trifling gesture to give to someone what only we, and God, can give: an hour’s respite, or a day’s, or a night’s; and sometimes more than respite: sometimes joy."

"Short story writers simply do what human beings have always done. They write stories because they have to; because they cannot rest until they have tried as hard as they can to write the stories. They cannot rest because they are human, and all of us need to speak into the silence of mortality, to interrupt and ever so briefly stop that quiet flow, and with stories try to understand at least some of it."

"...my belief in the sacrament of the Eucharist is simple: without touch, God is a monologue, an idea, a philosophy; he must touch and be touched, the tongue on flesh, and that touch is the result of the monologues, the idea, the philosophies which led to faith; but in the instant of the touch there is no place for thinking, for talking; the silent touch affirms all that, and goes deeper: it affirms the mysteries of love and mortality."

"...and I believed that everyone but those kneeling in front of me saw, and that was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me."

"Very early, I understood that women were required to be other than what they were."

"These women, like writers, have no time clocks to punch, no waiting boss. I write in the morning before teaching, and neither these women nor I care about the morning commuter traffic. There is no place we have to be. We already are where we have to be, facing ourselves. Both of us, without the prodding of a paycheck or the loss of a job, face only time itself, and our responsibility to use it as best we can."

"Travel by air is not travel at all, but simply a change of location; so my wife and daughter and I went to San Francisco by train, leaving Boston on a Wednesday morning in June and, then after lunch in New York, boarding Amtrak’s Broadway to Chicago."

"He told me he couldn't wait for the basketball season to end, so he could go back to baseball and get out of shape."

"Tony DiNozzo: William Felton Russell, 5-time MVP, greatest basketball champion ever. He used to get so nervous, so pumped, he had to throw up before every game... One night, the Celtics take the court. It's a big game, huge. Red's watching them warm up from the sidelines, but something's not right. He can tell, not clicking. He clears the floor, takes them all back down to the locker room. Why? Because Russell didn't throw up. You know what Red says next? Leroy Jethro Gibbs: "Get in there and puke, we've got a game to win.""

"[The sound of Russell throwing up] is a welcome sound, too, because it means he's keyed up for the game, and around the locker room we grin and say, 'Man, we're going to be all right tonight.'"

"How much does that guy make a year? It would be to our advantage if we paid him off for five years to get away from us in the rest of this series."

"Nobody can write a story about the Celtics and not talk about Red Auerbach. Much of my success as a professional is a result of the way he first approached me. A lot of guys said I'd never make it because I couldn't shoot. My first day with Red he told me right out that he didn't care if I never scored a point. He said they had the guys on the Celtics who could score. What he wanted from me was defense and rebounding. That suited me fine. He and I had one big thing in common — the will to win. When he appointed me coach he just said. "The job is yours." He never put pressure on me. He never even came to practice unless I invited him. Of course, I did — often. I would have been crazy not to take advantage of one of the smartest guys the game has seen. In moments of weakness, I almost like Red — a little."

"Something everybody else but Bill Russell excelled in was giving the coach good advice. I made the decisions, but I listened an awful lot. Sometimes in practice the other guys would talk for half an hour and I wouldn't say a word. I encouraged them to tell me what they thought."