[via Lori-Lyn] Alice Walker's letter to Barack Obama:

I would advise you to remember that you did not create the disaster that the world is experiencing, and you alone are not responsible for bringing the world back to balance. A primary responsibility that you do have, however, is to cultivate happiness in your own life. To make a schedule that permits sufficient time of rest and play with your gorgeous wife and lovely daughters....

I would further advise you not to take on other people's enemies. Most damage that others do to us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion. We must learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.

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At church yesterday, the preacher (Rev. Jason Shelton) told a story about breakfast with his 3 1/2 year old daughter, who asked about the photos she saw in the newspaper. It went something like:

kid: "Who's that?"
daddy: "That's John McCain, sweetie."
kid: "And who's that?"
daddy: "That's Barack Obama."
[pause]
kid: "John McCain's a funny name."

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The chamber choir sang Darron Meader's arrangement of "America the Beautiful" and Jason's arrangement of Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come."

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~400 words yesterday across nearly ten hours of writing -- half of them on a section I thought I'd finished revising, and half in new dialogue that just propelled the damn fic into a direction I hadn't expected. But as I was telling the BYM, there's a part of me that lives for this kind of wordsmithing -- where I feel driven to find the right words to show what the characters are trying to say and share. And it's so very frustrating to get things almost right but not quite, but it's so very exhilarating when locking onto the almost-right words yields me new things about characters I thought I already knew.