My mother showed me an article over the holiday vacation. It was something written by Eleanor Roosevelt and published in the July 1945 issue of “Coronet,” which my mom owned for some reason. It’s worth sharing:

I do not like the word tolerance. If you tolerate something, you do not like it very much.

I believe that what we have to do in this country is to stop disliking things and like them.

In the future the world is going to be tied together by airplanes and radio, and we are going to be near many people whom we have not had to know in the past. It is not going to be possible just to tolerate our neighbors. We are going to like them or they are not going to like us. Our neighbors are going to include people whose skins are yellow, brown, red, black and white. Their religions will be more varied than the color of their skins and our liking must come from understanding. Regardless of race or religion, human beings have certain things in common and we must discover that quickly.

We, in this country, are highly mechanized people. We have inventive genius where machinery is concerned, and mechanical skills. Some of the things that we have accomplished seem nothing short of miracles to other people.

Other people understand things, however, which we know little about. Our boys who have been in India are coming back to tell us about snake charmers and the people who make flowers grow before your eyes. These are powers we know nothing about.

So we have things to learn from other people just as they have things to learn from us, but we are not going to learn if we just “tolerate” each other.

I have an idea that we are going to find some fundamental traits, such as kindness and integrity and love of children, are present in many human beings.

If we can do away with fear, we will begin to love. If we are not afraid of aggression among nations, either in the military sense or the economic sense, we may have peace. If we are not afraid of being dominated by those who are stronger than ourselves, then we will learn to like people and to cooperate with them.

First we must cease to be afraid of our neighbors at home and take the word “tolerance” out of our vocabulary and substitute for it the precept, live and let live, cooperate in work and play and like our neighbors. If we do this, we will soon find that our basic needs and desires are the same, and that given the same opportunities for development, we will develop in much the same way.

The problem is not to learn tolerance of your neighbors, but to see that all alike have hope and opportunity and that the community as a whole moves forward.

I’ve had many blogs throughout the years. My very first blog I ended up breaking horribly while attempting to customize. After realizing I had broken it, quite possibly beyond repair, I gave up. I made a single post:

“Holy crap,” I said, “I royally screwed up when making this page. Perhaps through dumb luck it will turn out cool. “.

As luck would have it, it ended up being the coolest thing I will ever do in my life… ever. Why? This blog was on livejournal. My livejournal username was “L.” Ever since the “autocomplete” feature has been put into browsers, so too have people been accidentally truncating their URLs when backspacing bits of the autocomplete. Many, many, MANY people ended up at my journal completely by accident. They were trying to get to some other journal that started with the letter L and hit enter too early, or backspaced and hit enter, or something. My single post ended up getting a cult following and now has 1262 comments.

Shameful, I will never be able to compete with the level of coolness I have accidentally achieved.

http://l.livejournal.com/

Once a friend described me as the “Master of the Laze.” The other day I found myself wanting a laptop computer. Why? Because I was on the couch and my computer was not. I didn’t want to have to get up off the couch. It’s that same kind of lazy that makes me think I will never, ever manage to have a worthwhile blog. My old blog was “semi worthwhile.” For this one, I think I will aim for “occasionally semi worthwhile.” Here’s to hoping I find time and motivation to post, and wits enough to avoid foolishness.

I’ve been a PC user from the get go: from my first p100 to my two celeron systems, to my amd, to my latest intel dual core. I’ve always had “minor” issues with windows operating systems. The most egregious of which was turning my “media” folder into an OS-defined “media” folder and thus disabling my ability to sort by “last modified” and then re-defaulting these folders to their “media folder” settings despite my attempts to reset them to regular folders (finally resulting in me having to overwrite the registry “folder sniffer” settings).

Recently I installed vista and it has destroyed me. I am often unable to make basic changes because Vista is trying to “protect” me. I’ve done all I can to get rid of these silly protections, but that just makes Vista even more upset with me. Recently I lost all my Office shortcuts in my start menu (the shortcuts exist, they just don’t point to anything). Trying to repair, uninstall, or reinstall office is, without fail, returning an error. Trying to diagnose office tells me I can’t diagnose without the event log running. Trying to run the event log tells me “the instance name passed was not recognized as valid by a wmi data provider,” which means nothing to me.

You’ve finally done it, Vista. You’ve finally killed me. I’m trying drastic solutions now in an attempt to do the most basic of tasks, and it’s exactly as retarded as those Mac commercials make it seem.