A string of words can be powerful. The amount of words can be many or little but it doesn’t matter if there are many or a few…the message they contain can inspire, motivate, validate, teach, warn, threaten, humour, forgive, warm, ponder, love and so much more.When I was the homestay hostess for Asia HQ I learned that words are not just words…in many cases there is a right word for the right situation and in many cases the right word breaks all the grammar rules or has no written rules but is just something that you feel in your gut…like when do you use beautiful, pretty, cute or gorgeous?Many times we say one thing and mean another…we use sarcasm and tone and others just get our drift. We use double negatives or another oddity is when we say something like you don’t want to go to the mall do you. And we say no….no we don’t want to go to the mall. but this is technically wrong if we don’t want to go to the mall we should say yes. Yes we don’t want to go to the mall. But that is too confusing and if we did that we wouldn’t know what the hell we wanted to do!A big part of our culture is formed by the mass media and in many instances some marketing ploy or slogan becomes ingrained in everyday society. One of the jewels that is becoming oh so pervasive is “What happens in ….(put Las Vegas or what ever else is substituted thinking it is funny) stays in …. Now some how the slimeball masses have actually taken this to heart and think that when you leave your postal code you have the free pass to forget about your marriage vows, family responsibilities and any decency…I got to say I hate hate hate these words.Sometimes we say a string of words and on the surface they seem like such a good way of describing things…but in reality could be anything but and this is another line of bunk that makes me want to cringe….”We are just like family” and when this is said it is always meant that the group gets along so good they have fun and what could be further from the truth in most families? Now maybe I am just an oddity but I have found that families don’t always like each other or treat each other nicely or even with respect. And being together is more like being on one of those stupid reality tv shows rather than Leave it to Beaver. I think a lot of people being medicated with pharmaceuticals and street drugs have their families to thank for their “issues”.Some of the best words that I have heard in a while I heard while watching Michael Moore’s Capitalism a love story. It goes something like this…” I don’t want to live in a country that lets this happen…and I am not moving!” And these are some pretty darn good ones too…“Democracy is not a spectator sport, it’s a participatory event,” “If we don’t participate in it, it ceases to be a democracy. Sometimes words are so true but you don’t know how true until out of nowhere you are hit with some trauma…live one day at a time…and this simple message seems to be one that we just forget…we get busy planning our future, we getting busy fretting about some matter, we put off things because we think there is tomorrow, we need more money, we are too tired, we are too sore, we are mad, we are sad, or we just are bored and in a rut. I hadn’t heard from my friend who I met at University for such a long while…he was retired from a career in the federal government and he was an full time audit student. He volunteered, he traveled, he was busy, he always had a smile and always showed he cared and now I find out that out of nowhere he has a brain tumor. Yup maybe I better get back to one day at a time thinking…for it is all we have and we should really make it a good one.

“I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.”

Groucho Marx