Stretching a Thought, But is There a Ghostly orb in this photo?

I  decided to scan an old photo of myself for a ThrowBack Thursday posting.  However, my scanner would scan in black and white, and something on the photo caught my eye.

I had always noticed in in the original color photo, but it is distinctive on the scanned black and white.

The photo is from 1989 taken with a film camera.

There is a white streak next to me, and if you follow that streak, both ways, it starts at the ceiling, and the ends with a white dot at the top right corner of the window.  I had always thought that dot was a street light, or the moon, but now that I look at the photo, I think the dot is indoors.  I can't tell whether the blinds are up or down -the flash from the camera is reflected, which I take as an indication that the blinds were still up. These aren't the metal blinds, but they were wood blinds, so I don't think they would reflect as well.

I had always thought the streak next to me was a scratch. But would a scratch have such a distinctive route?  Then I thought it was the camera moving. But if that were so, there should be other streaks. For instance, the light indicator on the smoke detector above the door. That is a green light, and if the camera moved, there should be a streak there also.  There are other white dots in the photo, but i think those are just scratches off the original photo.

I used to watch those ghost hunting shows, and they would talk about orbs a lot. Orbs look like dust particles, but instead of randomly floating around, they would have a "route."  And it seems that this streak has a route.

I'm not a professional photographer, so I don't know what other explanations there would be other than a scratch on the lens or the camera moving.

But it is fun to speculate that my friend who took my picture many years back also caught a ghostly streak coming out of my ceiling and going into my bedroom.

With that, I present a Throwback Thursday photo one day early.

Back to Tony Robbins

Over the weekend I decided to put in a cassette tape of one of Anthony Robbins programs which 1/2 the session consists of his topic and half consists of an interview he conducts with a self-help type of person.  I'm only two tapes in and he has spoken with Ken Blanchard of One Minute Manager and Charles Givens, the late personal finance guru. OK, so Givens has a less than desirable reputation to some people, but I never really understood the Florida fraud case in which he was sued for, and ultimately settled.

Just to go of tangent a little, from what I understand, he was sued for fraud because he advocated dropping whole life insurance in favor of term life insurance - and the deceased had cancelled his whole life insurance and he died before enrolling in term life insurance.  And this is fraud?

It's just advice.  Whether it is Ken Blanchard talking about corporate management, Charles givens talking about money management, or Tony Robbins talking about being positive - it's all just advice.  It's up to the recipient to process that advice and act or not act on it, and the manner to which to act.

Anyway, back to the Tony Robbins talks.  When I was a teen-ager, I read Jose Silva's The Silva Mind Control Method, Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking, and a bunch of other self-help books.  I jumped on the Anthony Robbins bandwagon in the early 1990's.

As I got further and further into my career, I continued to think positively and all, but I stopped reading and listening to these motivational speakers on a regular basis, and when i did, I would just do so on a shallow level.

In 2012, I came down with meningitis, which almost killed me, and left me a paraplegic for a few months.  I'm still recovering, and over the last 2 years, I've periodically re-read self help books such as Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, and others, but with the same shallowness I had before my injury.

But last weekend, I put in the Tony Robbins tape, and something clicked.  As much as I try to maintain a positive outlook, I realized that being positive often needs tweaking, and listening to these tapes motivates me to tweak out the negatives that do build up and focus on the positives.

Sometimes they are referenced as coaches.  But they aren't, really.  You have to follow a coaches' order or get benched. These are just advisors, or consultants. You listen to them, and its up to you to take their advice, but their value is that they either bring a perspective that you hadn't thought of before, or they remind you  of a perspective you once had on a subject and move you towards re-considering that perspective.

Created an Author Page on Facebook

I tried to do this years ago, but author wasn't one of the choices. And although "author" pages have been an option for a couple of years now, I just got around creating one.

Steven Fujita page on Facebook

My 2015 Writing Projects

After devoting a lot of time to recovering from my spinal cord injury for the last 2 1/2 years, I am hoping to get back into fiction writing.

So, I am hoping this is the year I publish both the prequel and sequel to my first book, Sword of the Undead.  My plan is to publish a three-in-one book, call it Samurai Vampire: The Trilogy.  It will be 3 novella length stories. Book 1 will result in the first meeting between Yagyu Jubei and Lord Kageura. Book 2 will be Sword of the Undead, and Book 3 will be the modern day meeting between the 2 samurai.

My second fiction book I am hoping to write, but probably won't be finished this year, is a fictional account of my recovery from spinal cord injury.  In my non-fiction book, Toe Up to 10K, I leave a lot of emotions out, and that book is really more of a "this is what happens when your spinal cord gets injured, and this is what I did to help my body overcome as much as it could."  The book is a personal perspective, but I didn't devote any real time to inter-personal relationships.

A third book that I would like to complete this year, but may or may not be published is a sequel to Toe Up to 10K.   I think this is the year that my body will be strong enough to run a 10K.   Since I am injured at the T4 level, I am prone to an uncommon, but serious and potentially fatal condition when the body is physically overstressed, called AD (can't remember what it stands for).  I need to be aware of that.  That said, the sequel will cover my improvements since Fall, 2014 to present, and my journey and entry into a 5K or 10K race,

So, Happy New Year and Happy reading in 2015, everybody!