To Be Canadian

I spent Canada Day at the mall.

But I had on my Canada Day shirt, not a t-shirt but a shirt actually sewn by my daughter, white maple leafs on a red background, and I wore it proudly. There were a few people at the mall in red and white, but not many. You have to go to the events to really see them...I know that from experience. Normally I go to Fort Rodd Hill, a historical part of Vancouver Island, where there are ceremonies with representatives from all levels of government, a 21-gun salute and lots of birthday cake and activities. But this year I was sans my partner, so I ended up at the mall instead, doing some shopping for an upcoming family wedding.

To tell you the truth, my favourite part of Canada Day is not the local celebrations or the barbeque or the cold beers and flag waving. It's watching new Canadians receiving their citizenship. My family are all immigrants one or two generations back, the nearest one to me being my mother, who became a proud Canadian in the 1950's. She immigrated from Denmark after the Korean War, and decided that she loved Canada so much that she wanted to stay here. She often joked that she knew more about Canada than Canadians did because she had to go through some rigorous testing on her knowledge of Canadian history and politics before she could get her papers. She was proud, very proud of her adopted country, and she worked hard to learn the language and remove her Danish accent.

When I see families who have come from other countries under very difficult political or socio-economic circumstances, choosing this country because they know that they can make a better life...well, I tear up pretty good. They know the truth about how good we have it here much better than we do. It's easy to take it for granted when all we have known is freedom and opportunity. There are a lot of young people right now who could learn a lot by spending a month or two in an impoverished or politically oppressed country. I hope they grow up to learn the real value of the country they live in. Canada.

I know there are other wonderful countries in the world. But today is Canada Day, and I am unabashedly joyful and grateful to be here.

Happy Canada Day!

IJ

The Grassy Knoll

Image via Wikipedia

Conspiracy theories probably go back to the beginning as humans first roamed the earth with their knuckles a half-an-inch off the ground. It seems that we have been suspicious of forces at work against us since we were first able to imagine that they could be.

I became aware of the conspiracy phenomenon back in the '60s when John Kennedy was shot...that whole "grassy knoll" story where people swore there had to be a second shooter and maybe it was the mob or the CIA or Castro that did him in. And every few years, they'd pull out the old, grainy Zapruder Film footage once again and use increasingly sophisticated equipment to listen to the gun shots and watch the poor guy being blasted in the back of the limo, his hands clutching his throat and then his brains being blown out. What an awful thing for his family to have to see time and time again. I hope they didn't watch.

But people are obsessed with these conspiracy theories and can't just seem to let them go.

More recently there were dozens of YouTube videos posted after the tragedy of 9/11. One after another had a dark, moody voice-over provoking us with question after question on top of manipulated footage of the plane making a beeline for the towers or the towers collapsing. The planes were apparently "fake" and the government actually blew up the twin towers and all of the other towers too so that they could blame it on terrorists and use it as an excuse to invade Iraq. Well, that's what the conspiracy theorists say. There were so many of these videos created by so many people, you started to wonder. A few celebrities even became involved and started to speak out at public gatherings and meetings. What is it with our trust in celebrities? Just because they say something is true, that gives it more legitimacy? Honestly, they are often flakier than the rest of us.

When the Oliver Stone movie JFK came out, people started to wonder yet again whether or not there had been a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, because this was Oliver Stone, for pete's sake! There were others who came out in support of the 9/11 conspiracy theory, including Charlie Sheen and Rosie O'Donnell.

And even though Dan Brown howled "my book is FICTION!!", some people insisted on believing that all of the information in his "The Da Vinci Code" novel was fact. You just can't win.

There is a conspiracy theorist in my back yard. He's a retired radio jock who runs a local broadcasting and media message board, and every now and then he posts photographs of contrails in the sky over Victoria and insists that they are a conspiracy by the government to secretly make us breathe chemicals for some kind of experiment. Or something like that. Apparently, these are "chem trails" not "contrails"!

Every now and then he posts new pictures of these "chem trails" left behind by larger aircraft as they fly overhead. At one point, an airline pilot piped up on the message board in response to one of these tirades, trying to explain what contrails actually were, but this conspiracy theorist wasn't fazed. There is a Wikipedia site that explains the chem trails theory in greater detail than I care to go into.

He has posted other suspicions about global warming and left-wing conspiracies. They're all out to get us! And as it turns out, research tells us that those who believe in one conspiracy theory, tend to believe in another, and that it is very much tied to that age-old 'man's search for meaning' idea. It reminds me of a line from the movie "Signs", where one of the characters says something to the effect "people either see signs or they don't". Well, this guy is seeing loads of them.

And there are lots of theories out there to get the over-active imagination juices stirring! The Apollo Moon Landing Hoax is one where people believe that the moon landing was actually created on a movie set faked by NASA and some other organizations. The Holocaust, of course, is considered by some to be a Jewish conspiracy. And who doesn't believe in the UFO's at Area 51? There's everything from conspiracies about the Vatican Secret Archives to the theory that "Paul is Dead". Paul McCartney, that is. Oh, and who REALLY shot Kurt Cobain?

Much to my dismay, as I was researching conspiracy theories to write this post, I found that the latest "victim" is Michael Jackson. Well, I guess I wouldn't have expected any less. The poor guy had enough weirdness going on around him in his life, it's not entirely surprising that his death would only stir up some more. It unfortunate that the whole thing feels so unresolved because that only fuels the conspiracy fire. Hopefully, for everyone's sake, when the results of his toxicology come out it will answer some questions.

But I think that as long as human beings have over-active imaginations, they'll find another incident or persona to create a mystery around. In fact, I think I'm starting to see chem trails over that grassy knoll shot above...do you see them? Look at it long enough and you will :-)

IJ

The Lesson of Big Thunder Mountain

Image via Wikipedia

When my youngest daughter had her first day at Disneyland on her 11th birthday, she was afraid of pretty much every ride. We figured that the trip might end up with one of us staying with her while the rest enjoyed all of the Disneyland traditions like Splash Mountain and the Haunted House. She'd always been a little nervous about rides. But then she discovered Big Thunder Mountain Railroad...now that's not necessarily a ride for wimps either, but for some reason, she decided to try it, and after that, we could hardly get her off!

I rode with her on one occasion, grabbing tightly to the bars of the car as we whipped furiously around the mountain, when she finally suggested to me "Mom, just let go." I looked over at her and there she was, my normally nervous little girl, with her arms stretched high up over her head riding that thing as if she was born to it. She told me that it was a smoother ride if I just let go of the bars. And so I did. And she was right.

I often think of that moment when I'm struggling with my own life. We are, every day of our lives, riding a roller coaster between pain and pleasure. Most of the time it is a relatively quiet ride, but one day you might say to yourself "life doesn't get better than this" and the next you may find out that a diagnostic test has uncovered something that could be cancerous in your body. "That's life," is what we say to each other when something becomes so obviously out of our control. And when you think about it, much of life is out of our control. The only thing we really have any control over is our reaction to what goes on around us. So as I learned that day at Disneyland, I have to remember to let go rather than to grasp too tightly and try to control what happens simply because I can't.

Grasping on too tightly to anything will ultimately only bring pain and unhappiness. The truth is that nothing stays the same, not even those most majestic Rocky Mountains. Every object, every person, every moment, has its time to shine and then is no more. That seems a very sad thought, but when we learn to let go rather than desperately clinging to something, it's a much easier ride.

What is even more interesting to me about human nature is the tendency to cling to the bad stuff too, and how we will punish ourselves again and again for something that may have happened a long time ago. I catch myself doing that from time to time. It's as if I am right back there in that moment again, feeling everything I felt then as if it were right here in the present. Whether it's anger, humiliation, pain, fear...it feels as real as it did when I first experienced it. Now why would I do that to myself?

The mind is a funny thing...when it is undisciplined, it just flies from thought to thought until it finds a train that it is attracted to. Once it is on that train, it is held captive by the emotions and can't get off. Well, it can, but only if we direct it to. During the day when we are busy going about our business, the mind is too occupied with the tasks at hand to ride the train. But at night, as I have recently been experiencing more than usual, the mind can become a virtual wasteland of fears, anxieties and worries. Because you are not occupied and the room is dark and quiet so there is nothing to distract you, your mind goes on the rampage. Yes, I know, you've been there :-)

When you think of it, however, this is just another form of clinging although it is perhaps not as conscious. If you are able to step back from your thoughts for only a second, you can stop the train in its tracks. And when you do, you can redirect your mind to something else.

I give speeches. Yes, I know that sounds completely silly, but that's what I do. Even though anyone who knows me knows that I have performance anxiety in my "real life", when I'm lying in bed in the wee hours and need to distract myself from those hellish thoughts, I will imagine myself in front of people giving a speech on something that I know something about. And sooner or later I will bore myself to sleep.

Now, I don't always succeed. If I get too bored too quickly and I'm still awake, then that monkey mind of mine will be unleashed again. So I have to work at it. Sometimes, instead of giving a speech, I will win the lottery. I will spend a delightful time imagining all of the people I'm going to share my winnings with, and put myself in the seat of that Mustang convertible riding free and easy.

Oddly enough, even in my night time fantasies in that convertible, I never speed.
That could end up a nightmare...

IJ

...oh, yes, and by the way this summer my youngest daughter who is mentioned above, turns 21, and I turn 52. Our birthdays are 4 days apart...so the two of us are renting a Mustang and driving to the Okanagan :-)

I Don't Have Time For Social Networking!!

Image via Wikipedia

Okay, I admit I check into Facebook a few times a day. When I look at what motivates me to do so, I realize I just want to know what everyone is up to, and that's what Facebook is for. But I don't really update my own "What's on your mind?" window very often, certainly not as much as some do. My thinking most of the time is "who cares what I'm doing?" To tell you the truth, I don't really want to know EVERYTHING everyone is doing. I don't care to know each time someone has completed a puzzle or taken a quiz to find out what Star Trek character they are most like. I can't really use gifts like virtual teddy bears, or for heaven's sake, virtual glasses of wine! Don't be so cheap, get me the real thing!!

The whole "social networking" thing seems to be something that has taken over a lot of lives. As much as I check into Facebook, I know of others who live and die by those websites, constantly updating their status, adding photos, taking those silly little quizzes or commenting on their friend's activities. And some of my friends have literally hundreds of other "friends". I'm wondering if they even know half of those people. An interesting thing about Facebook is that it seems to have attracted quite a few of my generation and older, because we really DO want to connect up with old friends and acquaintances and we actually have that many, whereas you wonder how a 15-year-old could even know a couple of hundred people yet.

I've never signed up for Twitter, but it appears to be somewhat the same as far as constant updates and creating more connections. And it seems that every week or two, there is more news about some other social networking application or website. Recently, CNet did an article about ten music-related social networking websites. You're supposed to share your favourite music, update people on what you're listening to and check out what they're listening to as well. You can buy music and merchandise and concert tickets on some of them, and other sites will even offer up suggestions as to what new bands or artists you might like.

It's exhausting to even think about.

Which leads me to wonder...how do people have time to do all of these things a hundred times a day? Along with continuous texting or playing with iPod applications (there's another place to find all kinds of useless junk!), checking into Facebook and updating Twitter...how do they have time to even eat? It seems we've become a society that needs constant, 24-hour connectivity or entertainment...and we can't get enough of it. As soon as some new gadget or software or website or application comes out, we've got to have it. We can watch movies or TV or play games anywhere these days on our own, private hand-held devices, we can phone or text anybody from anywhere, we can update our Facebook or Twitter accounts whenever or wherever we want. A person from a third-world country would think we had become strange, alien addicts, permanently plugged into one device or another and always looking for more.

I'm sure psychologists are out there trying to determine what this behaviour is doing to us. On the face of it, connecting with friends seems like a pretty harmless thing...but it really isn't just about connecting with friends anymore for many people as far as I can see. It has become a rather narcicisstic, self-indulgent, me-important way of life for many, and what does that say about us?

There are a couple of people in my own inner circle who refuse to have anything to do with technology, and of course I laugh at them for not being "with the times". But the times they are a changin' rather quickly and I'm not sure that I completely disagree with their stance. A part of me doesn't want to get left behind or left wondering what this or that new confounded gadget is. The other part realizes that something is being lost by filling my brain and my time with all of this nonsense.

Maybe that's why I enjoy golf so much.

I know it's not just because of technology that I can't turn my head off these days, but I don't think it's helping either. I worry about my kids having grown up in such an environment and my grandchildren, who are about to. No, I don't have grandchildren yet, but already I'm worried about them! Younger generations have not had the benefit of a computer-less life as those of my generation and older have. They don't know about "boredom" or peace and quiet, they don't know how to create games from nothing but a pile of rocks or sticks. How many times have they sat on the edge of a stream in the wilderness dipping their feet into the cool water? Many of them would likely find that laughably dull.

I don't reject technology, obviously, or I wouldn't be sitting here typing this blog. But as with anything in life, there has to be a little balance.

Maybe I'll start a new Facebook group called "Turn The Gadgets Off and Go Outside!"
Probably wouldn't go over well.

IJ

The Writing Bug

Image via Wikipedia

This morning I decided to weigh myself. It was a bad decision, but also a good one in a totally unexpected way.

We have a scale in our carpeted bedroom, one of those digital scales...you press your foot on it to turn it on, and then once the 00 shows, you step on it. I have had trouble getting it to work lately, and I think it's near broken. It keeps showing an error when I step on it (maybe it means I'm just too light to be weighed? Nah...), so I have to put a book under it so that the surface it sits on is hard enough to register. I grabbed a book that was large enough for it to sit on, a black binder. It worked, so I got on it and up popped the numbers.

Ugh.

But my weight, thankfully, isn't the subject of this story. The black binder is. Inside are the pages of my father's autobiography written a number of years before the onset of his dementia. I have three copies of it now. They used to be at his place, but he's in a care facility now so I have inherited all but one copy that he keeps there. He was not the first to write one; his father, my grandfather wrote his story a number of years before that, and that's where the whole thing started.

My Auntie Edie, my father's sister, loved to write poetry and, inspired by my grandfather, she also decided to write her autobiography. I found out a few years back that my grandmother used to make up songs. Although I never met my grandmother (she passed away a few years before I was born), it gave me a bit of a connection to her since I eventually became a songwriter myself. My father's brother Bob, who is a professor of political science at Boston University, is also a writer. He has co-written a number of books on various political subjects over many years. So for me, the urge to write seems to be in the genes.

As I put the scale and the binder away, I thought again about my Dad and how it was a wonderful thing that he had written his life story down. My girls will read that thing one day, and my grandfather's story too, I thought, and I'm going to write one when I'm a little older, so they'll have an awful lot of reading to do. My mind wandered into the future, past a few generations or so. Wouldn't it be wonderful if one of our future ancestors (is there another name for future ancestors?) had a whole library full of autobiographies to go through? That would be a precious thing to some. I know it would be to me.

I shook off my depressing weigh scale incident and got on with my morning, ran a few errands and then I sat down at my computer to find an email from my cousin Karen through Facebook. I got a little tingle up my spine as I read it. I never realized that she was a budding writer too; she was sending me a link to her first blog entry which she completed just today. Is that what you would call serendipitous? As it turns out, over the years she has been encouraged by others to write, just as I have.

And now, here I am, writing about writing. I don't consider myself a great writer by any means, but I have always felt this urge to communicate something and it seems my life has become pretty much about that. First I wrote songs, then I kept a journal, and teaching guitar, which is what I presently do, is a way of communicating too. I am fascinated with how people learn, and I'm always looking for a better way to explain something. I drive my kids nuts with my habit of saying the same thing about ten different ways, until I feel like I've found the "right" expression. I write three blogs...this one, a music news-related one, and a songwriting one. So I definitely have a writing bug. I love a good story, and a good storyteller. There is an art to it, one which I feel like I'm only just beginning to understand.

So I'm happy to see that I'm not the only one of this generation of my family who writes. My cousin's daughter and one of my daughters also appear to have a writing streak which means it may very well carry on down the line, just as I was imagining this morning. That is, AFTER the depressing weigh scale incident...

IJ

Reality Shows Bite

I think I stopped watching television in a big way when reality shows began to pop up on every channel. I know that a lot of people love them. I don't. So my discourse here isn't going to appeal to any of you who watch them religiously. And why would I know anything about them if I don't watch them?

I should explain the configuration of my home. At night when I am finished teaching and come upstairs to the livingroom, I like to pull out my laptop and read or write. If I am to spend anytime at all with my husband, I have to sit in the livingroom with him as he is watching a 50-inch television that takes up a whole corner of the room. He watches a lot of reality TV, along with other dramatic series, and as a result I do as well. It's out of the corner of my eye, but the TV is so dominant that sometimes I get sucked into a scene or two, until I get bored or disgusted and put my earphones on and listen to Steely Dan.

There are two reasons I don't like reality shows. Okay, maybe three.

The first reason is because they have become insidious; once anything on television becomes a hit, every other network and station and writing team tries to duplicate it. Nobody is original. It's the "cookie cutter" effect. The same thing happens in pop music; songs, recording techniques and even singing styles are all copied or mimicked over and over, until pretty much every song sounds the same. There was a time not so long ago in Nashville, for instance, that the same bunch of session players were playing on pretty much every country record that was being released!

This makes it virtually impossible for those writers and producers (and I am married to one) who are trying to come up with fresh, new ideas, to get their work on television. I can tell you for a fact that networks will reject a television show proposal because it DOESN'T have a reality aspect to it. Can you beat that?

The second reason I don't like reality shows is because they exploit people. Now of course, these people or contestants, or whatever they are, sign up for these things and put their Joe Henry to all kinds of release papers so that producers can do whatever they want with what they shoot, so, in a sense, they know what they are getting into. Then why not put them in extreme situations and point the camera in their faces just to see how they react? In some cases, it's almost embarrassing to see the worst come out in these participants as they are thrown into all kinds of odd, awkward and exploitative predicaments. How about pitting them against each other so we can see who's really nasty and who's the wimp? It's cheap and dishonest, kind of like a National Enquirer on TV.

I wonder how many of these participants, once they see the final production, are surprised at how the editors and producers have created all kinds of situations that didn't actually happen. Which brings me to the third reason I don't like these shows. They aren't real. They are manipulated in every conceivable way for dramatic effect, so that the audience will be compelled to keep watching. I think most people know this as they are watching...but I'm assuming that many don't. When you listen to a conversation about the latest episode of some such reality series, people sound like they've been completely sucked in by the events, and yet the events are often faked. On the other hand, I've heard people talk about soap opera's as if the characters and events were real. Holy crap.

But now we come to "Jon and Kate Plus 8". I've seen bits and pieces of this show and participated in conversations about it, but the most recent events have really perturbed me. There are 8 small children on that show being followed around by a production team recording every moment of their little lives. That would be a strange enough environment to grow up in, but what has made it worse recently is that a lot of very personal stuff is coming to light about their parents which is probably making for even more tension in that house than usual. I won't go into the details, you can find that out for yourself. That is, if you haven't already heard! It's everywhere right now; in newspapers, on television news programs and talk shows and the internet. You can't miss it. Just this morning I saw a snippet of a conversation between a morning news anchor and a psychologist discussing the effects of these events on those little kids.

How parents would agree to have their child's every moment documented on television in the first place is beyond me, but I guess it's expensive to take care of such a large family so I'm sure the paycheque helps. However, recently it has become about these very personal issues; this family could literally fall apart before the television audiences' eyes. Do we really want to see that? It just feels so wrong to me. How they could choose to continue in light of these events, I don't know. But now we have another aspect to this whole nasty business. The ratings are going through the roof. Everybody loves watching a train wreck. And if the parents are even thinking of walking away from it all, you can bet there will be all kinds of heavy weights, producers, TV execs et al, begging them to continue. After all, it's about the ratings.

So the irony of it all is that reality, true reality, has smacked this little family in the face. And we get to watch. Isn't that great??

Maybe a few of us will get the idea and do the right thing. Stop watching. I don't know what's going to happen to those eight little kids, but I don't think it's my right to know.

Reality shows bite.
IJ

Anger Management - An Oxymoron

I was about 20 years old and living on my own in the West End in Vancouver, BC. One night, while returning home from a movie with a friend, we decided to take a short cut and walk down a quieter street. As we laughed and sauntered along, a group of guys were coming up the hill toward us. I wasn't paying much attention, but as they passed by us I felt a powerful yank, almost pulling my arm off. It took me a second to realize what had happened. It's funny how the mind works...my first thought was that someone had accidently bumped into me pretty hard. But my purse was gone, and these guys were running up the hill with it.

I don't know how long I stood there, but it seemed only a second before the first surges of rage began coursing through my veins, and against my friend's wishes I started tearing up the hill after the smarmy thieves. I was mad. Really mad.

It was a long hill and I was getting pretty winded, but after a couple of minutes and without looking back, the thieving punks actually slowed down and started walking, assuming they had accomplished their mission without incident. One of them must have heard me huffing and puffing up the hill, and turned around to see me on my angry charge. And what did they do? They started running again. Cowards!

Before I knew it, they had disappeared around a corner and by the time I reached it, they were gone. I didn't know what to do with the adrenaline in my system so I started crying as my friend finally caught up to me. Eventually, I got back to my apartment (luckily, I had kept my keys in my pocket) and I called the police. I never did get the purse back, but I changed my walking habits and bought a smaller purse that I could keep under my coat where no one could grab it.

The interesting thing that occurred to me after the fact was that when I was running up that hill, I had no idea what I would have done had I caught up to them. In fact, they might have beaten the crap out of me, or worse. All I could think about was how mad I felt, violated really, and how I was going to teach them a lesson or two! That's how stupid anger can make you.

There have been other, less dramatic, incidents in my life when anger took over and stupidity set in. I once ran out of the house and stomped down a dark street near my home after a guy who had thrown an egg at my daughter's bedroom window. I stomped really loudly so he could hear me coming after him. What exactly that accomplished, I don't know! But he started walking faster and then finally disappeared into the night and somehow I felt a sense of triumph.

I'm 5'4" on a good day. If you met me, you'd think of me as a pretty friendly, smiling, easy-going person, but I've always had a bit of a temper. I never scared my daughters much when they were smaller...as soon as I'd get mad, they'd start giggling. I guess I look pretty silly when I'm mad. But I've seen and felt the effects of anger from others and I know it's a serious business. Rage makes you dumb, it makes you say and do dumb things and it rarely accomplishes what you want it to. Rage is about getting or maintaining power. But there is no such thing as power over someone else, not really. Anger is something we try to use as a weapon, but which ends up hurting only ourselves. We want to "teach a lesson", but anger only teaches others to be angry and nobody really learns anything.

Road rage is becoming more common. There's a sense of anonymity when you're behind the wheel, so you yell and drive more aggressively because you really don't fear the guy in the other car. That's stupid too. Anonymous postings on the internet have become a way for people to spew their ignorant rage. You can be anybody or nobody and say anything you want because you're not really looking at anyone in the face...it's a completely self-absorbed action, when you think of it.

Sometimes you hear of people being made to take anger management courses when they are unable to control their rages and get into some real trouble. Though the term "anger management" seems like an oxymoron to me, these sessions seem to help some people.

The truth of it is that we're going to feel angry sometimes. In my observations there are two kinds of angry...the quick, reactionary kind, and the slow, brooding kind. In my case, since I have a quick temper, I've learned to give myself a beat or a breath before I do anything. That one second of hesitation is usually enough for me not to over-react to something that's usually just petty anyway. I know there are a lot of people who don't think they have that second, but it's there, and it can save you a lot of heartache if you use it. I don't always succeed, but most of the time I do. After that moment passes, I pay attention to what is going through my mind. A lot of the time, I'm case building. "He always does that, why doesn't she just...why only last week, they...". That kind of silly stuff. If I'm not paying attention, that second of hesitation will turn into a brooding session, so I have to go that one step further and watch my mind go through it's drama thing. As I'm watching it, the anger subsides because I'm not IN it. Does that make sense? And then it passes...which is what anger is meant to do.

Then there's the fuming anger...the kind that's triggered by one incident, but is fueled by days, weeks, and maybe even years of emotional affliction behind it. I know two people especially who experience this kind of anger on a continual basis. Both hold it in and brood for a very long time, but eventually it all comes out in one disproportionately large explosion. The solution to this kind of anger is very similar...you have to watch your mind, step outside yourself and carefully defuse the bomb. But in the case of a brooder, they have to backtrack over a long time and dismantle their artillery, not and quick and easy thing to do. But neither is it impossible.

I can't say that if I was walking down a street today and somebody grabbed my purse, that I wouldn't go charging after them again. But as I was charging, that little thought would probably come up this time: what happens when I catch them? And that would likely stop me in my tracks. Plus the fact that I'm 52 and I can't run like that anymore. Crap. Those suckers are going to get away!!

IJ

Anyone can become angry. That is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way - that is not easy. ~ Aristotle (384-322 BC) - Greek philosopher

If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow. ~ Chinese Proverb

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. ~ Buddha