Wed Reading Meme...

Is it Wed, already? This is the difficulty with having Monday off, I lose track of what day it is.

1. Book that I just finished reading?

I can't remember the name of it. This is bad. I just finished it two days ago. It was Patricia Briggs and...oh, Frost Burned. Whew. Knew it would come to me eventually. It wasn't very good. Well-paced, but fell into a lot of cliches, and I found the mythology and villains rather uninteresting. Also, the writer had written one character rather oddly. In other words, the story didn't work for me.
It happens. More often than I would like...but in a way, it's reassuring. Because hello, my stories don't work for everyone either.

2. What I'm reading now?

Night Broken by Patricia Briggs -- I was having issues with it, until the writer surprised me and started building on the female character she'd written oddly in the previous book. Also introducing more interesting characters, and better developed female and male characters. Plus the mythology - is Native American and Fae again, which is a lot more interesting than the vampires.

So...too early to say, one way or another. Most likely will buy and read the ninth book now. Wasn't going to, but changed my mind.

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle -- this is the sort of book that I'd have run the opposite direction from a few years ago, but works for me now. It's about letting go of the mind or thoughts, and controlling your thoughts not letting your thoughts control you. Rather fascinating, but you do have to be in the right frame of mind to intuit it. In other words, you can't be wedded to your thoughts.

We unfortunately live in a world that is driven by ego and thought. No wonder everyone is stressed and depressed.

He says something rather interesting about emotion, which he calls the body's reaction to your mind.

Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body's reaction to your mind --or you might say, a reflection of your mind in the body. For example, an attack thought or hostile thought will create a buildup of energy in the body that we call anger. The body is getting ready to fight. The thought that you are being threatened, physically or psychologically, causes the body to contract, and this is the physical side of what we call fear. Research has shown that strong emotions even cause changes in the biochemistry of the body. These biochemical changes represent the physical or material aspect of emotion. Of course, you are not usually conscious of all of your thought patterns, and it is often only through watching your emotions that you can bring them into awareness.

The more you are identified with your thinking, your likes and dislikes, judgments and interpretations, which is to say the less present you are as the watching consciousness, the stronger the emotional energy charge will be, whether you are aware of it or not. If you cannot feel your emotions, if you are cut off from them, you will eventually experience them on a purely physical level, as a physical problem or symptom. A great deal has been written on this so we don't have to go into it here. A strong unconscious emotional pattern may even manifest as an external event that appears to just happen to you. For example, I have observed that people who carry a lot of anger inside without being aware of it and without expressing it are more likely to be attacked, verbally or even physically, by other angry people and often for no apparent reason. They have a strong emanation of anger that certain people pick up subliminally and that triggers their own latent anger.

Fascinating. Does explain some internet kerfuffles. It's helping me at any rate. I've been practicing letting go of thoughts. Stepping away from them or outside them. And when I get upset, feeling the emotion and trying not to let it rule me or control me. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes not. Today was a mixed bag, partly because the insane slowness of my computer at work, and it's general disfunction was making me crazy.

Whoa...they may have to close all the public schools in Kansas

Found out tonight that the Kansas Governor's plan to build revenue by cutting taxes may result in the closure of the Kansas Public Schools.

The Kansas Supreme Court on Thursday gave the state until June 30 to fix its system of financing public schools, or face a court-ordered shutdown before the next school year begins.

Kansas has amongst the best public schools in the nation. The schools that I went to as a kid may end up being shut down. Not sure how it will affect the Universities.

(no subject)

This never occurred to me as a direct result of the weakening of the Voting Rights Act in 2013.

While the Native American population is small nationally, lawsuits involving tribes over voting problems have proliferated since the Supreme Court struck down parts of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, a signature legislative achievement of the 1960s civil rights movement.

North Dakota is one of 17 states that have new voting restrictions in place since the last presidential contest, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law.

Many of these changes have sparked lawsuits and accusations that black, Hispanic and other minority voters could be disenfranchised.

Five federal lawsuits involving Native Americans have been filed since the Supreme Court decision, including three this year alone.