Tag: essay

  • prompt 211 – my #1 priority tomorrow

    What’s your #1 priority tomorrow?

    I am a bonus reaper and record collector. I am a wonder-worker. No braggadocio. Without me, the team cannot get a bonus. That is my top priority tomorrow morning: meeting the quotas for getting a bonus added to the team’s next paycheck.

    First, I should follow up on the request for the records made last Friday so that attorneys can send demand letters to insurance companies to settle the cases. After checking my daily incoming emails, sending email reminders will be my first task. Like Earl of Kent, the loyal servant to King Lear, which an ordinary man is qualified for, I am fit for, and the best of me is diligence. But my manager is not King Lear; therefore, she ignores the best of me and favors her favorite servant, who is a knave young man with youthful bravado and scornful hubris. But I believe one day, the truth is to be told because the truth is truth to the end of reckoning.

    Nevertheless, I will reap my first priority tomorrow morning with the Earl of Kent’s diligence and Cordelia’s truthfulness.

  • prompt 210 – what i could do more of

    What could you do more of?

    Illustration from Dreamsite

    I could do more by being less serious about myself and the things around me so that I can relieve myself from the yoke of anxiety and anxiousness. The more I think, the more I worry like a spinning potter’s wheel until it breaks and splatters mud all around.

    Some wise men say you should laugh about things that you made mistakes about or made you mad about because then you wouldn’t feel so miserable or bitter about yourself. As I am getting ripen with the the numbers of moons and suns I have seen, I have begun to realize it has truth.

    Life is too short to torture myself for things I can’t change in watching the phantasmagorical display of my life in the end, thinking, “Oh my, wasn’t I so serious about nothing!”

    So, I could also practice laughing more and thinking less.

  • Prompt 209 on my favorite tv shows

    What TV shows did you watch as a kid?

    I used it to watch “Knight Rider” and “MacGyver” as a kid in the 80s because they were adventurous and chivalrous, Indiana Jones-type protagonists with bona ride missions to accomplish assigned by their benign wise bosses, of mercenaries of good causes for the Pax Americana.


    But regardless of the zeitgeist of the 80s, both shows were distinguished by their use of wits rather than guns. They were modern-day Western shows minus firearms and horses, in which good guys fought off bad guys and continued their journeys as romantic wanderers.


    To calling back yesterday, there were remakes of my favorite TV shows, but alas, the spirit of yesterday was not summoned with a wishful bid time return. You can never go back to yesterday.

  • prompt 208 on what brings me peace

    What brings you peace?

    The bliss of peace is made of these: a baby’s laughter, the soft flurry touches of my cats on my face, and their purring and meowing, listening to my favorite tunes and singing along alone, getting my hair done nicely, saying I love you to my cats with their little hearts on my heart.

    Peace may be transient, a precariously illusory daydreaming, or a timed reprieve from existential responsibilities. Still, peace is happiness when the breeze of peace envelopes me with a fragrance of acacia and takes me to the sea of skies.

    Peace be with you, readers.

  • prompt 207 on what to change

    What would you change about modern society?

    I believe a family is the nursery of a society, a nation, and the world. Whether it is headed by a parent or parents or a de facto breadwinner in the form of a non-disabled child, one thing is certain that good parenting is absolutely required for nesting humanity. That said, I will propose a law enacted for a qualified parent or parents who are mentally and physically able to nurture and nourish their children regardless of class and ethnicity.

    I believe there are no evil children, contrary to the popularity of demon children from Damien in Omen to Rosemary’s baby. Still, only bad parenting can produce the so-called demon children hell-bent on destroying humanity. For instance, so many convicted killers had disastrous childhoods destroyed by parental violence, from beating, swearing, and molestation to humiliation and degradation. How can you beat such a little child just because they are troublesome or bothersome? And it doesn’t matter the level of education or social status of a parent for the crime of child abuse. Not all of us are made for parents with maternal or paternal instincts, not because we are inherently evil, but simply because we are not for the roles.

    Therefore, I believe there should be a legal touchstone for being a good parent before having a child. If a mother or father is not ready to bring a child into this world and show him or her the beauty of life through thunder and lightning, then don’t be. Not everyone should be a parent.

  • prompt 204 on three books of life

    List three books that have had an impact on you. Why?

    Three books that have planted Tree of Golden Apples in my mind’s garden are the following elementals:

    1. Recollections: An Autobiography by Viktor Frankl – Dr. Frankl was the father of Logotherapy, one of the three Viennese Schools of Psychotherapies, who practiced what he believed and experienced. Far from an armchair scholar in the Ivory Tower out of touch with the crowd, Dr. Frankl gave hope, not as a delusional escape from the burdens of reality or dangerous daydream, such as Thuclides defined as the nature of hope, but as a beacon of light in the darkness of the soul crying for help. It’s because he was a survivor of the hell on earth, called Auschwitz, and other circles of hell under Nazi-ruled Austria. He wrote other books, which I have read, but this book pales others because it shows him not as a scholar but as a human soul whose spirit we all possess and, therefore, can relate to.

    2. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte – This is the book I can never get bored with. Since I received the book at the tender age of twelve in Korea, I have always loved it and returned to it when I feel lonely, very lonely, and lonely in this big, wide, cold world. Jane is my soul sister, and we have things in common. And I see what kind of woman Charlott Bronte was different from many people who like to claim. I like her works more than her contemporary peer, Jane Austen.

    3. Why I Write by George Orwell – This is a small pamphlet-like book. I carry it around when I feel like doing nothing, yet doing something resourceful and thoughtful to keep myself from mentally procrastinating. People tend to think writing belongs to intellectuals when it isn’t. It’s a record of personal existence through written communication to express one’s inner world within the outer world. But many people, including professionally established writers, like to think that writing is a form of art that belongs to the ether. It’s not, and the purpose of writing is simple. Orwell’s points of view agree with mine.

    These are the books that I always come back like trusty bosom friends who can keep secrets besides my two cats.