Foyle’s War: The Home Front Files, British TV series 2002-2015. Available on Netflix and Amazon and numerous other outlets. Good source for info: www.imdb.com/title/tt0310455/.
Well, last week I didn’t post about a book or a podcast or a movie, and this week I could talk about Beauty and the Beast, which I asked for as part of my birthday weekend and which we saw last night. (This trend of selling assigned movie seats is becoming quite a pain. Also, they’re pulling out the regular seats and putting in recliners, so there are fewer seats overall, but then I guess they’ve upped the prices. We always try to buy the discount tickets at King Soopers, but you can’t use them to book seats online. When we got there we were told there were three tickets left for the showing we wanted but they weren’t together and two of them were pretty close.
I’m cross-posting this article on the “Behind the Music” blog and on “Intentional Happiness.” As you know if you’re a regular reader, I belong to a community choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, and I write background essays on our selections that then turn up on my own website as well as theirs.
“Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. “ Victor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning.
Most of the time, I have more ideas for posts on the IH blog than I can actually use. Things come to me, or I read something, or I hear something, and I think, ‘That would make a great post.’ Once in awhile, though, I find myself a little stuck, asking myself, ‘What should I write about today?’ So it was this morning, the start of a new work week.
I just went over the calendar from now until May 13, which is 52 days (not counting today, but counting that last day). Sometimes we get really ramped up over the very short term (what’s going to happen this week) or the very long term (what’s going to happen in the next year), and we don’t think in the medium term. So it struck me this morning that there are several pretty big events (PBE’s) that are going to take place over these next 7 ½ weeks:
The Perpetual Now: A Story of Amnesia, Memory and Love by Michael D. Lemonick, published by Doubleday, 2016. Visit the author’s website at 
Periodically I’ll get into a discussion about the question above. My dear friend Cecelia and I used to argue (sort of–she’s too nice of a person to really get into it) about this issue. She’d say, “I think you need to accept people the way they are” and I’d say, “But Cecelia, then how will they ever change?” We would have this discussion in particular about a mutual friend who . . . well, I won’t give any details. Suffice it to say that what Cecelia thought of as harmless eccentricities I thought of as remediable faults. (Not that I was being judgy or anything.)
As I’ve said many times on this blog, I am a classic Obliger, which means that, while I have a hard time getting myself to meet my own expectations I readily meet others’ expectations. How I wish, wish, wish that I had known this about myself 50 years ago! But Gretchen Rubin, the woman who came up with the Four Tendencies framework, wasn’t doing much writing then, as she would have been a toddler. Actually, I wish that I’d known about the Tendencies 53 years ago. I’ll be 65 at the end of this month, so 53 years ago I’d have been 12 years old. That’s a nice threshold age, I think.