I’d like to call myself a writer, but I’ve not really written anything impressive or worth saving for posterity, save an article I originally titled Reflections of a Bus Rider which got published in a national newspaper and a term paper on Behavioral Conditioning which my college professor published as one of the only two papers he rated 1.0 that semester. These and other products of less academic value like love and loneliness poems written in my pimpled teenage years and love –and hate—letters both sent and unsent. And yes, I’ve written a few nonsense blogs and no-brainers on facebook, too.

I couldn’t write because like in most things, beginning to write is hard. I guess EATING is the only thing that’s easy to start, but writing, like most things such as saying I love you or I am sorry, or even taking a bath on a weekend, is pretty much a challenge.

I couldn’t write because I want to get it right. Right grammar, right amount of humor, right number of paragraphs, right beginning, right conclusion. I usually start with something and if it doesn’t sound right, I usually find an excuse to postpone it for later and eventually lose the opportunity and the inspiration altogether.

I couldn’t write because I’ve read many other good stories and essays and I’m content just by reading and appreciating other people’s work. I’ve recently read an old friend’s blog and was quite impressed with how her writing has significantly improved all these years. She used to copy from my assignments back in college! But I guess I just need a good excuse for not coming up with my own.

I couldn’t write because I have plenty of other more important things to do. I used to stay up late and claim the quiet evening as my own. I wrote poems and unspoken love in my diary, letters to friends, even lyrics to what I imagined would be songs. Now, time spent with the computer is for finishing boring paper work, transferring photos from the camera, or watching downloaded movies. And when all these important things are done, I’m either too tired to be creative, or too normal to be sentimental.

I so crave for the thrill of finally getting a whole composition together. Going through the piece from top to end, polishing verbs for better ones, adding modifiers, changing phrases, hmmm like carefully painting newly baked cake with pretty icing. I don’t know when I would ever have that right time to come up with the article of my dreams, but I gotta run. I have the weekend’s pictures ready for transfer.

I bought the book “diary of a young girl” on a tour during my college days. And I started reading the book about 2 and half years after that. I am very interested in history and the mysterious stuffs in the world like”barmuda triangle”,”UFO” etc.I have already read something about Anne frank during my high school days. That’s the main reason why I bought the book,eventhough I don’t spent money on buying books.

First I started reading the book, but it felt like I don’t understand, so I stopped reading the book, and I thought myself why I bought that book. It may be because I always wanted to know a lot of things like history, facts regarding various countries, also very much amused about ancient events. Whenever I see people intelligent people on TV talk about these subjects, I always felt that I should read more and wants to know more. But it always remained as an undone task. As I am more interested in other things like films, internet, friends etc.

When I read small bits of information about some great personalities, like the sufferings they had, and the adventures they did, I always pictures me in that positions always wanted to do such things in my life.And I think of the fame it will bring on me.

I had similar experience with ANNE Frank’s book. I think of me in her position, even though it has a tragic end. I wonder how much knowledge the people of those times they had. Even though being a 14 year old girl, Anne was a very well expressed intelligent child. I am amazed how beautifully she expresses her emotions. She expressed her fear, her daily routines very clearly. Even though there was a little source of information during those days compared to present days she was well aware of the happenings around the world. She knows even about india,about Gandi,about the freedom struggle in India.

Throughout the book there is a lot of remarks regarding the French course, Latin courses, various books they have read. That clearly shows how much they are interested in reading. They even do exercises in French, translation of French etc.I don’t know how they find such an interest in these activities, when they are unsure about their future. Also the traditions in their family in various occasions, gift sharing etc are very well shown. She says in the diary that she wants to live even after her death, and her dream came true.

I wonder what would a critic of those who remain out of work suddenly? Perhaps because if suicide is not able to see ”between the lines” what is a story that can help us learn to get up after falling, especially when we forget that he who exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted, is the last straw. Better enjoy this story that has all the flavor of Nia Vardalos and Tom Hanks
What makes Larry? Despite being a regular guy, nothing special, then worked in a warehouse. As was told to prepare, search and find a course at the University of improvement which gives Mercedes Taino (Julia Roberts), a woman who is on the verge of abandonment because relations with her ​​husband Dean (Bryan Cranston) foundered.

Attend class Mercedes Tainot on Speaking: public speaking. She stopped when classes have fewer than ten students, and when Larry arrives and is ten and has to deal with them.
Then go to class with Professor Economics Matsutani (GeorgeTakei) and although he takes the phone in each session, Larry learns, becoming the best student.

Be friends a group of his companions, all young people, especially Talia (Taraji Henson) and Dell boyfriend. She is responsible for putting in tune with the clothing and convinces him to buy a scooter and discover that Larry is very comfortable and cheap travel on a scooter.
Lamar (Cedric the Enterteiner) and his wife B’Ella (Pam Grier), its neighbors will sell the scooter and help to finish off their properties to pay their bills and mortgages.
Larry returned to college and take courses in Speech and Economics is an inspiration to two and his young companions, and especially for the teacher who falls in love with Mercedes Larry

1. “Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.” It sounds good to me, I mean the practicality of all things does involve money but it doesn’t have to take an arm and a leg to get it.

2. “I believe there is something out there watching us. Unfortunately, it’s the government.” ‘Nuff said.

3. “There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?” This happens to be one of the classic ones. I mean the issue about life’s little problems isn’t all that bad, until ‘he’ shows up.

Sure, relationships can get complicated, or does have its complications that probably any author about relationships is bound to discover it soon. We follow what our heart desires, unless you’re talking about the heart as in the heart that pump blood throughout your body.

4. “Love is the answer, but while you’re waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty interesting questions.” And if you want more, just keep on asking!

5. “A fast word about oral contraception. I asked a girl to go to bed with me, she said ‘no’.” It sounds, ‘practical’, I think.

And when it comes to everyday life, he really knows how to make the best out of every possible scenario, and it doesn’t involve a lawsuit if he strikes a nerve.

6. “Basically my wife was immature. I’d be at home in the bath and she’d come in and sink my boats.” I never had a boat in my bathtub before. Just staring at it while soaking in hot water makes me seasick already.

7. “I am not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” If it rains, it pours.

8. “I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose.” It could get worse when you’re guzzling on beer… or mouthwash, and it happened to me once!

9. “If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.” At least he doesn’t smite us with lightning, and I’m thankful for that.

And despite of what may happen to all of us in the next ten, twenty, or even thirty years, I guess we all have to see things in a different kind of light and not just perspective. I can’t seem to imagine life without any piece of wisdom that could guide us. Whether we’re religious or not, it takes more courage to accept your fears and learn how to deal with them is all that matters when it comes to even just getting along.

And to sum things up, here is the last nugget of wisdom to go by… however, whenever, and wherever we may be.

10. “The talent for being happy is appreciating and liking what you have, instead of what you don’t have.”

Not that easy?

People often describe being single as an unhappy experience. Never believe in what they say, for happiness is within yourself. It’s up to you whether you want to be happy or sad, whether you are single or not. You might be forced to be single, but you still have other options; would you prefer being a happy single, or the sad one?

Look at yourself

Check on the mirror. How do you look like? Do you like it or not?

Many people forget to take care of their self when they’re in a relationship, for they’re too busy taking care of their loved one. Now that you don’t have anyone to take care of, it’s time to get yourself together.

One left,  more to go

Being single doesn’t have to make you alone, or lonely. Many people even have so much more time to catch up and have fun with their friends, families or relatives after they’ve returned to their single life.

In June 2006, the real estate market in my home town took a nose dive.  It looked a lot like an airplane falling from the sky, ready to crash land into the ground and burst into flames.  Oh, is this too dramatic a picture?  After all we are talking about real estate, not air disasters. 

Many will say it was unexpected.  More will say “it had to happen; the real estate bubble had to burst”. Few were prepared for how much and how hard the world would fall.  I too thought it would never hit this hard.  After all the press always blew things out of proportion.  I went to sleep one night in 2006 with a great, but frustrating job, lots of pay, a new software in development which was my husband’s path to our future and woke up 18 months later with that same job paying 60% less, no investors in our software company, up to our eyeballs in business debt, a house 60% upside down and our lives totally out of control!

What do you say when things like this happen?  You say WOW; we must work on a different path.  We say, let’s try it on our own.  Let’s try swimming upstream.  Honestly, I don’t even know how we navigated those next five years.

Many people in my community, in communities around the country spent the last five years in a daze.  Did we know where the next bit of work would come from?  Did we know if we were improving or getting worse? Some turned to their faith for answers, others to “the government will be my savior”, others to whole new career paths.  I just went back to basics.

The big question is “did we learn from this experience?”  Some will say yes.  I am now saving 10% of everything I make, no matter what (read “The Richest Man in Babylon”).  Some say no, as soon as they were able they started charging up new credit cards that replaced the old ones.  What do you say?

I say what a wakeup call.  I really didn’t expect this to be more than 5 years worth of worry and stress and discovery.  I wish I had all the answers, even now with all the lessons on the table, I am not sure I have learned all that I need to move forward.  I do know that it’s time for my spirit to return.  It is time for my inspiration to build and for my writing to return.

There are many out there that have lived through this last five years and are so much better for the struggle.  What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger!  I have heard that before and I do believe we are given the tools to make us stronger; we just have to use them.

So this is the first chapter in a very long path.  I could say “back to who I was,” but that would be a mistake.  I think it’s a path to who I can be.  So if you would like to join me on this journey, just keep an eye out for the next chapter. 

If you like, comment to me on your journey and we can move forward together.  Certainly 2012 has potential?  What do you think?

What would you do if you found your inner voice?

You have an inner voice don’t you?  We all do.  Yet, sometimes we don’t always choose to follow our inner voice.  Also, sometimes people don’t want to even attempt to search for their inner voice and find out what it wants.

Thoughts are surrounding you all the time, and they are just waiting to be released.  Your inner voice is a very private one that you should care about exposing.  When we think about it, it really is what changes us every day.  We are new, fresh and better because of our inner voices.

What if you were stripped away of other stuff.  You know, relationship, your body, your possessions and other stuff, what would your authentic face look like?  Write about it.  Who are you really underneath all that skin.  We all know that physical beauty is just on the surface, but underneath is what really counts.  Those hidden layers about you is what defines you.

After all, we really are like an onion.  Or perhaps a layer cake, but the onion takes longer to peel.  Maybe you are like a year supply of sweet onions.  Hey, they are much sweeter than a regular onion. 

Maybe you are like an exotic fruit.  A mango, papaya or star fruit.  Maybe you are all of them pureed together to make up a blended smoothie.

If you were a fruit, which one would you rather be?  I think I would rather be a fruit than a vegetable.  And if for some unknown reason I ever became a vegetable in a hospital, I would hope that my family would cut the ties and not leave me hanging.  But I hope that never happens.

Our inner voice should be thought of often.  We all have one.  As writers, we decide to search for it all the time and we are writing down in a free write about what we are learning about ourselves every day.

Who can say they are still the same person they were twenty years ago?  Not too many.  Twenty years ago many of us hadn’t even begun to find our style, our personalities, favorites, and our learning experiences as writers.  It takes most of us lots of time to nurture ourselves. 

Many of us take our whole lives to figure it out.  And we follow our hearts as we go.  At the end of our lives, we have collected a body of work that has stuck with us.  And we are usually most remembered for something.  Artists have a body of artwork that becomes the strong point of their career as an artist.  And there will always be one piece that stands out. 

For me it is the drawing I did of my grandmother when she was a child.  It is one of my most detailed drawings I have ever done.  And it is photographic and realistic.  I have about ten to twenty of my strongest stuff that I really like.  But I also have 1000’s of drawings that I have accumulated over my career as an artist.

And I would say over the last ten to fifteen years, I have developed a strong sense of writing and I become stronger every day.

Your inner self grows with you and is different every day.  It just depends on your needs and goals and dreams.  We all come from different walks of life and we lead colorful lives that are worth exploring until we die.

So keep finding that inner voice.  Listen to what it wants you to hear.  You should go to it often.  Please don’t shut it out and throw away your own private voice.  It’s begging you to let it out.

Jennifer Jo Fay

Copyrighted January 12, 2012

 If you look around, you would see so many people dying a slow death. It is passing through life and being affected very little by its summons. It is also breaking things without actually discovering their hidden import. Suicide is living like nothing mattered at all. A slower suicide, subtle and painful, is that of living indifferently, unaffected. Living without passion is suicide. People begin to feel the thrill of life when they decide to get out of routine, to throw away the old gadgets, the familiar rules of the game, the already-used-to-tools, and begin to seek innovation and novelty.

There is a time when maturity means change, where growth means rising above mediocrity, where living were dying for something. If you have never felt the pull of something that unnerves you, that agitates your spirit so powerfully that you become ready to put up arms, if you have never felt the throb climb higher, to breast the everlasting hills and rise, to look beyond the limits of what you have known until now, then the child in you is still asleep. Those who dare break routine and dance with the rhythm of the passion that wells from deep within them become heroes and arbiters of change for a better society.

Life is not about securities. Those who actually live are ever taking chances and risking the best in them. This reality echoes in the classic words of a celebrated poet, Robert Frost:

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the road less traveled by. And it has made a difference.”

And I ask you, I dare ask you: how many pleasant roads of adventure would have led us, you and I, farther down the bigger treasure and noblest purity of life, roads we have shunned out of cowardice or the fear of loss? We dare not venture where none ever had walked. We fear the less untraveled roads of life for many reasons. I will sum them up in three:

1. Mediocrity:  We are always secure with what we have. And we remain inhabited with the fear of losing it. The more curious, ridiculous truth is that we even fear losing the things we do not possess.
2. Mediocrity: We always fear knowing more about who we are. We fear to descend into our darkness. We like swimming in the surfaces of our shallowness. Going deeper would mean truth and truth is responsibility. We fear going deeper for we would know, and knowing is freedom. We would like free falls if we have an idea of what we are landing on.
3. Mediocrity: we always fear hurting someone; hence we remain slaves of his or her caprices or of our own. And aren’t we products of a manipulated and manipulative society?

There is one way that takes us above our shallowness. It is passion for life: this reckless desire to step into its traps and be tamed by its currents.

This is excerpt from vanguardngr.com of 1st January, 2012:

Better still, what is on the mind of a 90-year-old man? Death, family squabbles when he is gone, regrets?  You would not know until you explore the mind of 90-year-old, Pa Tete Allen, a grandfather, who began primary school education three months ago (September 2011), the first time he was attending school.

*Pa Allen in class

The power of the mind is incredible. Its capacities to affect others are all over us. Inventions that have changed the world are some of the mind’s powers. Pa Allen is changing minds and lives with his message from his own corner. Was that his intention? Did he know the impact of what he set out to do?

He changed minds of editors in Vanguard, where the usual issues of the day were riding high on the list for Man of The Year. It was the final day. We were in the finishing minutes of the exercise. Some lawless truck drivers cut many of us off from the office and arrivals were in trickles. Our unique manner of voting for the Man of the Year ran thus – everyone made a nomination, made a presentation, then the editors voted.

Someone nominated Pa Tete Allen. It sounded like a joke until after the presentation.

Unknown, except for a few media interviews, unrecognisable from the creeks of Nembe, his mind speaks volumes. His message is spreading fast, knocking off notions about commencement age for basic education.

At his age, struggles are natural. Some his age cannot be on their feet. Education would be far from their mind. Pa Allen saw education as a weapon to change his life. He wanted to write. He wanted to read documents he used to thumb print. He wanted to improve himself. He wants to begin life at 90.

He wants to change his mind to change himself. Pa Allen may become a replacement in the Guinness Book of Records for Kenyan Kimani Ng’ang’a Maruge, who enrolled at school at 84 in 2004 after Kenya made primary education free. Neither the challenges of age, nor the 2008 post_election violence that displaced him from his native Eldoret, stopped his education.

Before his death in 2009, aged 89, with two years left to complete his primary education, Maruge, in 2005, addressed a United Nations session in New York on the importance of primary education, pleading with world leaders to make primary education free.

Maruge, like Pa Allen had his reason for seeking education. “The preachers mislead people. That is why I wanted to learn how to read the Bible,” Maruge said.

Both reflect the extent of poverty in Africa and how it devastates the people. Their parents could not afford school fees. Millions of Africans can be more productive with education. Governments are too busy pleasing themselves.

Pa Allen, at 90, would have remained illiterate if he had no sponsor. His determination is inspiring others, just as Maruge did in Kenya. Unlike Kenya, where primary education is free (free text books, uniforms) those who Pa Allen inspires will have to pay their way through school. Can they?

Will governments catch the dream and save generations of younger Nigerians from living with the limitations of illiteracy in their old age? Will individuals and organisations help Nigerians to discover that “Learning is liberty” as Maruge put it? Who will help the uneducated; those Pa Allen calls them “the helpless”? Pa Allen is pointing a new direction – and inviting Nigerians to live above their circumstances and make changes. It all starts with the mind, your mind.

From the above its obvious that Vanguard Nigeria made a good choice in Pa Tete Allen. This should be an inspiration to many who see age as telling on them and do not want to do something they have been dreaming of or they had wanted to do in life.

You’ve probably met people throughout the course of your life and thought, he’s a genius or she’s a genius. They have a knack for something that elevates them above and beyond the rest of us, a talent that seems completely natural and at the same time marks them out as unnaturally gifted. But at what point do we label them with the genius tag? And how can we be sure that tag is well deserved?
 
Type the word ‘genius’ into Google and you’ll get more than three hundred million listings. According to Wikipedia, geniuses embody “exceptional intellectual ability, creativity, or originality” that hints at more than knowledge and more than skill: it displays a degree of insight and understanding that’s both baffling and astounding.
 
One can be a musical genius, a marketing genius, a genius with words or numbers. Some people display their genius mindset in everything they do, such as Leonardo da Vinci. Others limit their scope to particular areas or fields of study, like Henry Ford or Mozart or Alphonse Mucha. But they all seem to have one thing in common: their ability to think outside the box and come up with something new, something fresh, something extraordinary.
 
The word ‘genius’ is related to the Latin verb gigno, genui, genitus, which means to bring into being, create, or produce. As history evolved it became clear that certain individuals were blessed with particularly powerful genius traits, which led to the word acquiring its more modern meaning of talent or inspiration.
 
So the question is: what makes someone a genius? Is it a flair they’re born with, or is it simply a question of thinking in a certain way? Can these extraordinary attributes be learned and developed, or is it just a matter of luck of the draw?
 
Research into what ‘powers’ a genius continues, especially in the realms of psychology and related disciplines. Many courses are available to try and help ‘ordinary’ people make the best use of their inherent talents, and there are hundreds of books available that promise to boost your brainpower. Whether or not that’s the key to success is debatable: what is known, though, is that we each have the potential for genius inside us, if only we can find some means of unleashing it.
 
If you’ve ever thought of a better way to do something, or had an idea for a product that would make your life easier, then perhaps you’re already a genius. Maybe you’ve discovered a link between two disparate objects that no one else noticed. Or perhaps you’ve written a poem or a piece of music. All of these things can be said to bear elements of genius within them, but is that enough for someone to be hailed as a true genius?
 
The argument is set to continue for some time to come. Meanwhile, make sure you don’t take any chances. Write down or record every idea you come up with and keep it safe. And who knows? This time next century someone might be writing about you.