Quotations by Junie Moon

Today's automatic quote of the day is "Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it."  Lou Holtz said that. Sports enthusiast that I am not, I had to look up Lou Holtz. I went to the brainyquote.com website full of Lou Holtz' quotes, and to my ear he sounds a little bit preachy. The man has a lot to say, most of it seemingly designed to make hearers feel like failures if they don't kill themselves in pursuit of goals. 
Goals. 
Any kind of goals, apparently. 
Preferably ones that make you feel as if you might be drawing your last breath any minute. Physical pain equals virtue in Lou's world.
I do, however, like this one:  "The problem with having a sense of humor is often that people you use it on aren't in a very good mood."  
That's right up my alley. If I planned on having a headstone, I think I might want that on there.

Lou's famous, so everybody wants to know what pearls have dropped from his lips. I'm not famous. I used to be notorious, but that was then. Now I'm an overweight late middle-age woman who can make a double entendre out of almost anything, laughs too loud, reads and knits. In conversation I swear a lot, and that surprises people because I don't look like a person who would know all those words, never mind be able to use them with such expertise. I think all that makes me as interesting as Lou Holtz, so I'm going to share some recurring thoughts of my own. Once they're written down, I can call them Quotations by Junie Moon. 
Maybe they will resonate with you. Let me know.

When all a person has before him is a bunch of bad choices, he can't be blamed for making a bad choice.

Faking gaiety/happiness/interest is tiresome for me. To tell you the truth, I'm not all that interested in lots of stuff that other people talk about. I listen to people talk about nothing . . . the former pastor of the church, the current pastor, whose volunteer fireman cousin had a wheel fall off his car while he was on the way to firehouse for a call ("Oh, no. He wasn't hurt. He hadda call Roosevelts to tow him outta the ditch but there's no damage done.") . . . all day long. It's taken me a long time to realize that I can sit quietly and not participate, much less cheer-lead. It's much less stressful for me.

If I'm tired, I've decided that it's not only okay, but even advisable, to sleep. 

My cell phone is for my convenience, not the convenience of others. I keep it turned off most of the time.

Nothing comes to mind that needs to be all or nothing. I can clean the bathroom sink and not the tub, I can knit two rows instead of fifty at a sitting.

People who live in warm climates should not opine in a ridiculing manner about wind chill information in weather reports. 
When your daily temperature, averaged over the entire year, is 73.3F, and the "feels like" average runs warmer than that, you don't know from wind chill. When you live on top of a hill in between the Catskill mountains and the Adirondack mountains, and the hundred foot walk from house to barn on a windless day is long enough that your eyelids freeze open and with wind, you grow icicles in the scarf over your mouth . . . then you can tell me about wind chill. 

Wind-Chill Chart

At the supermarket

At the supermarket meat case, two women, backs bent over the well-lit array of packages of beef, pork, chicken. They are centered on the chicken: legs, thighs, breasts. One of them moves packages of boneless breasts around, checking total prices on the packages, says, "There don't seem to be any bargains here."
The other woman says, in a resigned tone, "There aren't many of those anywhere anymore. I keep waiting for chicken drumsticks and thighs to go on sale for $1.99 a pound, and I don't think it's going to happen."
"Well," says the first woman, reaching to the side, "Y'gotcher legs and thighs here for $2.39..."
"I know..."
"But it isn't $1.99."
A silence while the two stare some more at the packages of boneless chicken breast. Family-size packages of eight or ten half breasts . . . cheaper per pound than the packages of three or four. 
"I hate to lay out fifteen dollars for chicken..."
"Me too. But I want to cook something different!"
"Oh, what the hell. What're y'gonna do? There's only so much pasta you can eat." and the first woman takes the package marked $2.49 per pound, $14.31 total, the lowest price in the bunch, and pitches it into her grocery cart.
The second woman laughs ruefully . . . "Right!" . . . and follows suit.

Nobody even bothers looking at the beef. 

Gives a whole new, and banal, perspective on the last two lines of Millay's The Anguish:

Happy are the toothless old and the toothless young,

That cannot rend this meat.