{"id":25267,"date":"2019-11-07T13:13:39","date_gmt":"2019-11-07T19:13:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=25267"},"modified":"2021-02-25T09:50:38","modified_gmt":"2021-02-25T15:50:38","slug":"on-chicken-soup-for-the-soul-think-positive-and-count-your-blessings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2019\/11\/07\/on-chicken-soup-for-the-soul-think-positive-and-count-your-blessings\/","title":{"rendered":"On <em>Chicken Soup for the Soul: Think Positive and Count Your Blessings<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/thinkpositiveandcountyourblessings.jpg\" width=\"200\" alt=\"Book cover\" align=\"right\" hspace=\"4\">This audiobook is a collection of sort little essays about, well, counting your blessings and finding the bright side of things.  It has eleven pieces by eleven authors.  One of them is, literally, a woman who enumerates one hundred blessings, so it&#8217;s a couple minutes of sentence fragments.<\/p>\n<p>A couple of them seem a little fictionalized.  One features a woman coming to college in her forties who collects aluminum cans from the campus garbage for her daily bus fare and sometimes, on good days, her lunch.  I look askew at this story, though, because I cannot remember a time when aluminum can prices were high enough that you could pay bus fare with a couple cans picked up.  You&#8217;d have to fill a bag or so.  Even the old automated machines that appeared briefly in grocery stores only gave a penny for two cans, and that was at the height of the market.  Another deals with a snow storm where a woman breaks up furniture and keepsakes to burn them to keep warm, and how liberating that is.  A lot of wood stuff, especially inexpensive stuff, is made with pine, and that would have been an unpleasant indoor fire indeed.<\/p>\n<p>At any rate, it&#8217;s a little like the mindfulness that more la-de-dah people get from their Buddhist and Yoga texts.  With a little uncluttering thrown in (ironically).  It&#8217;s got a Christian bent, and the first three or four items featured divorced (and sometimes multiple divorces) people.  I bet they needed some perking up.<\/p>\n<p>Did it make me feel better?  It&#8217;s not the sort of thing that changes your life in one listening.  It&#8217;s the sort of thing you should probably steep yourself in to eventually, over the repetition, that can guide you to a better mind set.  And it&#8217;s not an unpleasant hour or so of drive time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This audiobook is a collection of sort little essays about, well, counting your blessings and finding the bright side of things. It has eleven pieces by eleven authors. One of them is, literally, a woman who enumerates one hundred blessings, so it&#8217;s a couple minutes of sentence fragments. A couple of them seem a little [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audio-courses"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25267"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25268,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25267\/revisions\/25268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}