I Love The World

I Need A New Dream

March 13, 2008 | Dear Cary,

My husband and I have been happily married for 11 years. We learned some time ago that fertility might be a challenge, and it has been. We hoped to see our abiding love and commitment writ small in toes, sweet cheeks, milk burps. Instead, we've seen success turn into soul-crushing defeat over and over. Often there are no successes -- there is just more defeat. We are sad and tired.

I keep thinking that being infertile must be a little like being an addict. Early on, when everything still seemed possible, we said to ourselves, things might be bad but I'll never ... I'll never (lie, cheat, steal, turn tricks) have a screen name like "MOMMY2B," or mortgage the house, or ask strangers on the Internet for their interpretation of my menstrual period, or resent the effortlessly fertile, or measure my grief against another's, or buy Ancient Chinese Secrets, or name a baby whose heartbeat you never get to hear. You know, like these other poor bastards. But you go down the road and these are the things on the road. You do things that surprise you, good and bad. You let people down and hate yourself for it. You wonder if you should stop, but can't.

The meds and the tests and the advice and the waiting and the hope and the money slowly took over our life, until nothing else seemed that important. Our circle of friends changed. We become more isolated. People who don't know invariably ask when we're having kids (you guys love kids so much, you should have some!). People who do know look at us with pity. Sometimes they can't look at us at all. I think they fear having to see our naked and writhing heartbreak, or having to consider the many times they complained about their sleepless, colicky nights and envied our freedom.

Many couples like us choose adoption. We could love any child that entered our home. But we will not, cannot, get on a new merry-go-round of waiting and disappointment. We're out of resources in all the ways that matter. Many people won't understand that, given the strength of our desire for a family. But that decision is "right" for us given our circumstances. We made it together and we will live with it the best we can. So the end of the road could really be the end: childlessness.

Our grieving began some time ago. But I did not expect the overwhelming sense of purposelessness I get every time I think about being childless in the end. I believe we are here to live in service. Very few of us have the experience of a saint or a martyr, and give everything. Most of us are simply meant to strive to be vital, happy, grateful, respectful, generous, loving, kind, productive. To give as much as we can as often as we can, but to be basically just ... ordinary. I thought my contribution would be the quiet and humble goodness of that striving, and that we'd offer our community a family raised in that way.

I work hard and am successful professionally. I'm strong. I was lucky enough to have choices, and smart enough to make good ones. My husband and I have accomplished a lot together. We try to live consciously. This isn't about baby fever. We planned for and dreamed of a certain kind of life, knowing it would make us profoundly, contentedly happy -- but it will never happen. I can't think of anything to do next that would be as fulfilling as raising our family. Make more money for corporate America? Get a dog? Travel? Go back to school? That stuff seems reasonable, but only for the short-term. We are regular and enthusiastic volunteers, but sorting cans of food-bank green beans isn't deeply fulfilling compared to, say, the first day of school. Nothing I can think of gives me the peaceful contentment I felt imagining 20 years of family dinners followed by the chance to do it all again as a grandmother. I've come to a blank spot that I can't fill, and it stretches past the horizon.

I know many other people's problems are much worse than ours. We do try to be patient and grateful. Our love for one another has grown, a blessing and comfort. We didn't think we wanted a lot for ourselves, but I guess it was still too much. I don't know if I can get over it. When the life you wanted and sacrificed for is gone before it even starts, what do you do next?

Barren: adj., lacking inspiration or ideas -- Merriam-Webster

Dear Barren,

This is a very moving letter. You have poured your heart out. I feel as though there isn't much I could say that wouldn't sound trite. You have probably heard it all.

So let's say the simple, basic, true thing first: You are suffering.

You are suffering the loss of a dream.

Let's just sit here with you a minute. We don't have answers. We are not gods. We can't change biology.

So what do you do?

I suggest that you grieve seriously and hard, that you dedicate yourself to your grieving and that you make of your grieving a project as robust as your quest for a child.

I suggest that you go on retreat somewhere alone. Take a week or two weeks alone somewhere, a spiritual retreat if you are spiritual or a secular retreat if you are secular, but a retreat that fosters quiet. Rest. Just rest. Rest and do not speak much. Sleep a lot. On the first couple of days just rest and sleep and walk and do not speak much. Eat and read and write in your journal and walk around and sleep and rest and do not watch TV. Do not talk on the telephone or use the Internet. Let your senses come back to you.

Avail yourself of massage and heat, water and sun, herbs and oils and meditation. Heal yourself. Be taken care of.

Take notice of the things around you and their beauty.

Let a new dream come to you.

You need a new dream. That's the thing. You had a dream and perhaps because it did not seem such an outlandish dream you invested everything you had in that dream. So now you're depleted. You're grieving the loss of this dream.

I know you will get through it. I know that. You would get through it regardless. But will you get through it in a gentle, strong and beautiful way, or will you get through it violently, by lashing out, by allowing your hurt to take shape as blame and resentment? That is why it would be a good idea to go away for a week or two and be taken care of.

You must grieve the loss of this dream and prepare for something new. You must find something to look forward to, some joy, some vision of life to sustain you.

A reader sent me a book a few weeks ago called "When Things Fall Apart," by Pema Chodron, a Tibetan Buddhist.

Buddists talk about suffering. They say we struggle against the truth and in struggling against the truth we suffer.

The Buddhists say relax, slow down, take notice.

I like the Buddhists! I like their style!

You are facing the truth. You see it. It is right in front of you.

So what do you do? You grieve.

You feel this.

And you wait for a new dream to come to you. It will come. Don't worry. It will come.

By Cary Tennis Original Link HERE.

What Men Wish You Knew About Them -- The Heroes Inside Us by Walter Kirn

This is the great secret. This is the great truth.

We don't particularly value our own existences.

It starts around age 3 and never stops: the process of rehearsing all the ways in which we might gloriously die. We've barely been born when we start mock-perishing. The first time I bit the dues was in an ambush by three or four boys who'd armed themselves with sticks that were either machine guns or swords, I don't remember. Nor do I remember which force of evil I alone was resisting that fateful day when I first fell backward on the grass, clutched my heart, and let out the sight that tells a man's foes that they may have killed his body but they'll never vanquish his spirit. I was five years old, but the whole performance felt instinctive.

Women are enocuraged to give life. Men are encouraged to give it up. The basic scenario, ofcourse, involves standing up to the bad guys on behalf of some innocent person or high ideal. The other basic scenario involves being one of the bad guys - the baddest of all. Either way the ending is the same. We fall, we sight, there's a pause, we get back up, and then the next day we pretend to die again.

We don't always die in combat. That's just one way. Sometimes we die from exposure or starvation while exploring the arctic or trekking through the jungle. Sometimes our rocket ship crashes en route to Mars or our race car hits a wall during the last lap of the Daytona 500. Sometimes the smoke inside the burning house that we've rushed into to rescue the little girl's kitten is just too think and toxic to withstand. And sometimes we die from simple overwork while laboring selflessly to support our loved ones or save the ranch from bankruptcy.

What doesn't change is the satisfaction we take - in our fantasies, that is - at going down fighting with our boots on. What also doesn't change is our suspicion that we might not be mourned as deeply as we imagine or honored for as long as we might hope. That stirs a certain resentment in some men.

Since kindergarden we've been demonstrating our willingness to die at practically any moment for virtually any cause, and the women who will outlive us don't appreciate it. Yes, today we're grouching about the phone bill or failing once again to mow the lawn, but tomorrow we maybe out defending the homeland or pursuing an armed robber down a dark alley. Women shouldn't forget this. What looks like a husband napping on a sofa is really a hero of tomorrow dreaming his own selfless demise.

The least a women can do is let him sleep.

A Waltz for a Night

Top Ten Reasons Why Humans Have Sex

After asking nearly 2,000 people why they’d had sex, two psychologists Cindy Meston and David M. Buss (at University of Texas at Austin) have recently assembled and categorized a total of 237 reasons. Their list is a very thorough, interesting taxonomy of sexual motivations.

Below are the Top 10 :
1. I was “in the heat of the moment.”

2. It just happened.
3. I was bored.
4. It just seemed like “the thing to do.”
5. Someone dared me.
6. I desired emotional closeness (i.e., intimacy).
7. I wanted to feel closer to God.
8. I wanted to gain acceptance from friends.
9. It’s exciting, adventurous.
10. I wanted to make up after a fight.



I am glad to point out that "I wanted to have a child" is the reason No. 27.

Hmm..

Conversation With A Stone

- by Wislawa Szymborska

I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I want to enter your insides,
have a look round,
breathe my fill of you."

"Go away," says the stone.
"I'm shut tight.
Even if you break me to pieces,
we'll all still be closed.
You can grind us to sand,
we still won't let you in."

I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I've come out of pure curiosity.
Only life can quench it.
I mean to stroll through your palace,
then go calling on a leaf, a drop of water.
I don't have much time.
My mortality should touch you."

"I'm made of stone," says the stone,
"and must therefore keep a straight face.
Go away.
I don't have the muscles to laugh."

I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I hear you have great empty halls inside you,
unseen, their beauty in vain,
soundless, not echoing anyone's steps.
Admit you don't know them well yourself."

"Great and empty, true enough," says the stone,
"but there isn't any room.
Beautiful, perhaps, but not to the taste
of your poor senses.
You may get to know me, but you'll never know me through.
My whole surface is turned toward you,
all my insides turned away."

I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I don't seek refuge for eternity.
I'm not unhappy.
I'm not homeless.
My world is worth returning to.
I'll enter and exit empty-handed.
And my proof I was there
will be only words,
which no one will believe."

"You shall not enter," says the stone.
"You lack the sense of taking part.
No other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part.
Even sight heightened to become all-seeing
will do you no good without a sense of taking part.
You shall not enter, you have only a sense of what that sense should be,
only its seed, imagination."

I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I haven't got two thousand centuries,
so let me come under your roof."

"If you don't believe me," says the stone,
"just ask the leaf, it will tell you the same.
Ask a drop of water, it will say what the leaf has said.
And, finally, ask a hair from your own head.
I am bursting with laughter, yes, laughter, vast laughter,
although I don't know how to laugh."

I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in."

"I don't have a door," says the stone.

Like this poem? Try Failing And Flying by Jack Gilbert

Internet Porn Statistics

Where All Street Signs Go To Rest

for jei who loves to take photos of them. ^_^
















Original link here.

Fantastic Tiger Diving Pics

Original Link here.

There Is NO Mystery to Happiness

There is NO mystery to happiness.

Unhappy men are all alike. Some wound they suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark of love put out by scorn – or worse, indifference – cleaves to them, or they to it, and so they live each day within a shroud of yesterdays. The happy man does not look back. He doesn’t look ahead. He lives in the present.

But there’s the rub. The present can never deliver one thing: meaning. The ways of happiness and meaning are not the same. To find happiness, a man need only in the moment; he need only live for the moment. But if he wants meaning – the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his life – a man must reinhabit his past, however dark, and live for the future, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting only that we choose between them.

EXCERPT FROM: INTERPRETATION OF MURDER BY JED RUBENFELD

Father and Daughter

8 Rules For Writing A Short Story by Kurt Vonnegut

On pages 9 and 10 of his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading
   characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the
   reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as
   possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could
   finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007

- By Lev Grossman, Original Article Here.

The proper length for an obituary for Kurt Vonnegut is three words: "So it goes." This one will do what Vonnegut never did, which is go on too long.

"So it goes" is a phrase from Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade. It's an expression the Tralfamadorians — a race of four-dimensional aliens — repeat whenever somebody or something dies. It expresses a certain airy resignation about the inevitability of death. Vonnegut — who died Wednesday night at the age of 84 from injuries suffered in a fall — had the Tralfamadorian attitude. "I've been smoking Pall Mall unfiltered cigarettes since I was 12 or 14," he told Rolling Stone last year. "So I'm going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, who manufactured them. And do you know why? Because I'm 83 years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me."

Vonnegut was born Indianapolis in 1922, the son of an architect. His early life shows the kind of aimless lateral peregrinations of someone who was in the process of inventing a kind of person that hadn't really existed before. He put in a mediocre stint at Cornell before enlisting in the army in 1942, in the teeth of World War II. Shortly afterward — and within a year of each other — two events occurred that would prove to be formative for Vonnegut. In 1944, on Mother's Day, he came home on leave to discover that his mother, an unsuccessful writer, had committed suicide with sleeping pills. In December of that same year Vonnegut was captured during the Battle of the Bulge and sent to Dresden as a prisoner of war. On February 13, 1945 Dresden was leveled in a massive Allied bombing assault so intense it created an enormously destructive firestorm. Well over 130,000 people died. Vonnegut survived by hiding in the basement of a slaughterhouse.

Perhaps because he began his writing career fully disillusioned, Vonnegut's view of the world changed very little over his five decades as an author. His first novel, Player Piano, was published in 1952 and set in a spiritually empty, hyper-mechanized future dystopia. (Vonnegut mixed literature with science fiction long before it was cool.) His most famous novel — his personal favorite, and the one that deals with most directly with the Dresden disaster — is Slaughterhouse-Five, the story of one Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes "unstuck in time": Billy experiences the events of his life in random order, including his own birth and his own death. Understandably, this imbues him with a weird, almost redemptive fatalism, which is echoed by the narrator, who is Vonnegut himself. "There would always be wars," he writes, "they were as easy to stop as glaciers... And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death."

Vonnegut's sincerity, his willingness to scoff at received wisdom, is such that reading his work for the first time gives one the sense that everything else is rank hypocrisy. His opinion of human nature was low, and that low opinion applied to his heroes and his villains alike — he was endlessly disappointed in humanity and in himself, and he expressed that disappointment in a mixture of tar-black humor and deep despair. He could easily have become a crank, but he was too smart; he could have become a cynic, but there was something tender in his nature that he could never quite suppress; he could have become a bore, but even at his most despairing he had an endless willingness to entertain his readers: with drawings, jokes, sex, bizarre plot twists, science fiction, whatever it took.

Vonnegut struggled with silence and depression — including a suicide attempt in 1984 — but in all he managed to publish 14 novels, three short story collections, five plays and five works of non-fiction. His last book, Man Without a Country, a collection of essays published in 2005, was a surprise best-seller.

Although he died a literary celebrity, lionized by the culture of which he was so unsparing, Vonnegut was always drawn to outcasts and failures in his writing: criminals, the deformed, the exiled, the damaged, the insane, anyone who no longer had a stake in repeating society's familiar lies. The cast of Cat's Cradle includes one of those outcasts, a midget to whom Vonnegut gave the title speech:

"No wonder kids grow up crazy," the midget says. "A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's..."

"And?"

"No damn cat, and no damn cradle."

RAPISTS: Come and Get It.

Rape-Stopper's Razor-Sharp Bite

Scumbags of South Africa, you have been warned. Later this month, women there "will be able to arm their vaginas with the Rapex device, a product priced at 1 rand (around 14 cents) and sold over the counter," the Guardian reports. "Shaped like a female condom and worn internally, its hollow interior is lined with 25 razor-sharp teeth, which fasten on to an attacker's penis if he attempts penetration."

Some people - including women's campaigners - have criticised the device for being "vengeful". Well, as its inventor, Sonette Ehlers, has said, it's "a medieval device for a medieval deed". If any rapist finds himself hopping with pain as a result - as well as facing the fact that the only way to remove the device is said to be a highly awkward and incriminating hospital visit - that seems just fine to me. Yes, it's vengeful. Yes, it hurts rapists. Oh well.

The device is "inserted with an applicator like a tampon, and removed with the same applicator," according to the Rapex. It can stay in for up to 24 hours. And it will be "available in various sizes... small, medium and large."

When should it be worn? "If you have to travel long distances alone, on a train, working late, going out on a date with someone you don’t know too well, going to clubs, or in any situation that you might not feel comfortable or even just not sure."

"The myth of the vagina dentata - vagina with teeth - has proved strangely compelling down the centuries, " the Guardian adds, "but who would have thought it would become real?"

Source:  http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2007/04/rapestoppers_ra/  

Audrey Kawazaki

Komorebi

Oil on wood 15x11
2007

More: Audrey Kawasaki

Calculus Batman

Anil Gupta Arm Tattoo

This is what I'm getting if I get the needle. The great Anil Gupta.

School Lawn

From a display at Reed College, Portland, OR. Each white flag
represents six dead Iraqis since the beginning of the war, and each red
flag represents a dead US serviceman. Statistics come from the Lancet
survey of Iraqi mortality since 2003, published October 2006

my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell

- By Gwendolyn Brooks, 1945

I hold my honey and store my bread
In little jars and cabinets of my will.
I label clearly, and each latch and lid
I bid, Be firm till I return from hell.
I am very hungry. I am incomplete.
And none can give me word but Wait,
The puny light. I keep my eyes pointed in;
Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt
Drag out to their last dregs and I resume
On such legs as are left me, in such heart
As I can manage, remember to go home,
My taste will not have turned insensitive
To honey and bread old purity could love.