Kipling

This morning I had a piece of brown sugar/apple cheesecake for breakfast in the cafeteria of the Timpanogos LDS temple.

Got back to school, ate six (6) Albertson's chocolate chip cookies, and right now I'm munching on the second to the last "tot" from my jaunt to the AFHS lunch room. Now {} I've finished off the last.

A student just brought me a Code Red Mt. Dew. I'll nurse that bad boy until lunch when I'll probably end up eating a piece of apple or something. I am so easily influenced by my surroundings. I need to be like Rudyard Kipling:

"If you can walk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much . . ."

This quotation seems to argue against John Donne's idea that "no man is an island" (Meditation 17). Kipling seems to be coaxing me to aspire to "island"ness. Allow no man to affect you.

Stand true, tall,
be familiar with all,
and resist the cookies, cake and all

Donne tells me there is no such thing as a person that does not influence another, Kipling says that when everything influences, don't act like they're affecting you. Hmmm . . .