Time for bed. I leave you with this sweet song of adoration, sung by one of my all-time favorite singers, Nina Hagen.
Why Krishna and Hinduism? Well, only the Hindus got the nature of the universe correct. Interestingly, most of the hits on my essays about time and the universe come from India.
Me? I'm a Quaker that sees the universe through Hindu cosmology. The Universe is God.
Over the years, I have written much about time itself. Time, I believe, is the piece of reality that most humans misconceive and this misconception of time leads us to mistakenly believe that we are individuals, that the past is gone, and the future has yet to happen. A God's eye view of reality is nothing like the human conception of reality. In truth, we are all strands extruded across time, merging with one another towards "the past" and joining with one another towards "the future". We're like a mesh of intertwined fibres which merge and separate into a great tangle. Our awareness moves in one direction along those fibres, but the universal consciousness see it all at once.
I have this memory problem that has been plaguing me my entire life. From how other people describe their memories of the past (with expressions like "through the mists of time"), I take it that most people's memories fade. For me, memories do not fade. They remain the same and vibrant, forever. In fact, there is not qualitative difference in my mind between yesterday and the same date 10 years ago, or 20 years ago, or 30 years ago. I remember the days of my childhood like I remember yesterday. When my mind's focus wanders to a past event, all of the emotions, the smells, the sounds, the details, of that past event enter my mind and literally take me back to that moment in time.
You might think this is a great problem to have, but it is terrible. It is an absolute torture. Imagine never being able to fall out of love with anyone. Imagine feeling every pain you've ever felt as vividly as if it happened yesterday. Imagine every loss being as close as yesterday. Imagine how emotionally crowded yesterday would be for you if everything in your life happened yesterday! It sucks.
Yesterday gets thicker and thicker with events and emotions as each day passes for me. Sometimes I want nothing more than to forget every memory and start all over again. At once I am falling in love with my ex-wife and losing her too, losing my cat, losing my dog, losing my ex-girlfriend, gaining my wife, experiencing my daughter coming into the world, losing a past job, finding a new one, experiencing the death of loved ones, ... I could go on and on. The emotional burden is crushing.
I learned sometime back that other people cannot deal with someone that comes back into their life after decades have passed. For me, it was just yesterday that we last spoke. Knowing empirically that others do not see the past the way I do, I resign myself to not reigniting friendships that have long since passed, though to me we were friends yesterday.
There are ways to forget the past. Sometimes I consider undergoing a medical procedure that would weaken my memories, but I fear that I will forget the things I need to earn a living, so I do not follow through. Perhaps one day, when I retire, I will do as my uncle Rony did and weaken my memories. He was much happier after doing so. Perhaps I would be too.
As I've mentioned, I'm learning French. I am taking a class and I've hired a tutor to help me. I've studied many languages before and I have to say that French is the hardest (to pronounce) of any I've tried seriously to learn.
I did want to learn Vietnamese when I was married to my first wife. (It is reputed to be the hardest language to learn). I begged her to teach me the language. I bought a Vietnamese dictionary, a tape to help with pronunciation, and other materials. I was dying to learn the language. No classes were available. She never helped me learn. She resisted at every request. Perhaps the lesson to learn is that if your foreign born wife refuses to teach you her language, she has something to hide.
I met my second wife in 1994. By 1996, I was speaking Spanish pretty well. I now speak it fluently.
As for French, for various reasons, knowing French would make my world better, so I am taking the plunge, with enthusiasm.
The Prince case is another reminder to keep communication open and non-judgmental between teenagers and adults, experts say. Here are a few tips for parents to know whether their child is being bullied and how to handle it.
• Know that a child who is being bullied will most likely first tell a peer, then a parent and then a teacher. "Always know who your child's friends are, and if a child answers you, 'I have no friends,' that is a major red flag," said Robin D'Antona, founder of the International Bullying Prevention Association. The group organizes national conferences and conducts training and workshops on how to prevent school bullying.
• If your child confides to you that he or she is being pushed around, do not minimize, rationalize or explain away the experience, Coloroso cautioned. "Assure a child that they didn't cause the bullying; empower them," said Coloroso, who keeps a list of do's and don'ts about bullying on her site.
• Routinely ask your child whether he likes school. If a child replies that he "hates" school, go deeper for details. Does he or she hate the academics? Can he not see the board? Figure out the source of your child's attitude toward school.
• Privacy ends where your child's safety begins. Watch what your child is doing on the Web, and check his or her cell phone. If a child wants a diary, buy a book and suggest that it be stashed under their mattress, D'Antona said.
• If your family usually addresses concerns at scheduled meetings, consider giving that up for more flexible communication. Allow a child more freedom when they talk to you. Be open to talking at any time, and consider talking while driving. The child may feel less intimidated because he or she doesn't have to look directly at you.
The Spanish language is an acquired taste that becomes, with each year speaking it, more and more beautiful until there comes a time when no other language can touch its magnificence. I've grown to love Spanish. It is supremely poetic.
About 10 years ago I stopped forming close friendships with non-related females. For most of my life, my closest friends were female. This was a major issue of tension between my first wife and I and an even bigger issue of tension between my current wife and I. Somewhere along the way I began to realize that most of the women I have known as friends have later turned out to be liabilities.
I did not realize, until I had a daughter, that females can be terribly vicious bullies. They back-stab each other. They feign friendship only to gain information or to later turn around and hurt one another. There was one girl that would invite my daughter to spend the night at her house and then turn around, at the last minute, and uninvite her. When it happened more than once, we realized it was a ploy she played in order to hurt my daughter. As a very pretty girl, my daughter became the target of other girls for this kind of bullying. In time, she learned to tell the difference between false friends and real friends, a lesson I did not learn until I was about 40 years old.
My ex-wife used to warn me about female friends and how they were not true friends. My current wife would warn me too, but more forcefully. Over and over again she would turn out to be correct in her negative assessment of female friends I knew. Female friends are far more likely to backstab you than male friends.
The other negative aspect of friendships between sexes is sex. Countless times I would find out that a female friend wanted more than a friendship, or her husband or boyfriend would suspect that something was going on, or that my wife would suspect that something was going on, and, once in my life, I did fall for a female “friend” (who turned out not to be a real friend at all) and that harmed my relationship with my first wife.
As a consequence of the above, I have sworn off close friendships with females. Such friendships are a good thing if you are single, but for married people they only lead to trouble.
I learned the hard way to both avoid the "oversharer" and to share little of myself. The oversharer is often looking for information. For all you know, the oversharer's shared intimacy is a lie anyway. For example, when I was being stalked in Harvard Square, an undercover Dedham, MA police officer (Ed. Saint James) pretending to be an anarchist leaned over to me and started talking about his "ex-wife" and how he tried to kill her, thus winding up in jail for a spell. This dick never went to jail and his story was bogus. He was hoping that by intimating some "dark secret" with me, he would make me feel obligated to share my secrets with him.
On the other hand, if you share too many details of your life with coworkers, they may use those details to harass or stalk you later.
Boris came to me at the behest of his new girlfriend, Cecily, whom I'd known for years. Since most people dislike being pushed to see any sort of adviser, I expected Boris to be reticent, if not downright hostile.
How wrong I was! After a few minutes of chitchat, Boris himself raised a very personal issue.
"I know why Cecily's confused," he said sheepishly. "We've been dating for months, and we still haven't slept together."
"Okay," I said cautiously, not wanting to disrupt a delicate moment.
"You see," Boris said, looking at the floor. "Ten years ago I had a cancer scare. My, um, prostate. It turned out to be benign, but mentally, it affected...;you know." Eyes still averted, Boris described his sexual difficulties and the vicious mockery he'd endured from his former wife. I felt terrible for Boris but also secretly pleased that he'd felt safe enough to divulge such personal information.
The next day, Cecily called to thank me. "Boris seems happier," she said. Then her voice dropped. "You know, ten years ago...;" She repeated Boris's prostate story, including all the gory details. "I know we have a really special connection," Cecily said, "because Boris shared that with me on our very first date."
"Ah," I said, developing suspicions...
Interesting. I wonder if any guys share the sad truth about their tiny weeniers in order to win intimacy with women?
Man, my wife is going to be thrown off balance by this. She's had a crush on Ricky Martin since she was a little girl (unlike my wife, I don't get jealous about this kind of thing).
Of course, I'm happy for Ricky Martin. He no longer has to hide who he is.
Pop singer Ricky Martin declared publicly this week what he avoided discussing for years: He is gay.
"I am proud to say that I am a fortunate homosexual man," Martin wrote on his official Web site. "I am very blessed to be who I am."
A decade ago, when ABC's Barbara Walters pressed Martin to address rumors about his sexuality, he declined to confirm or deny them. "I just don't feel like it," Martin said.
Now, Martin wrote, "these years in silence and reflection made me stronger and reminded me that acceptance has to come from within and that this kind of truth gives me the power to conquer emotions I didn't even know existed."
The 39-year-old Puerto Rican native started off with the Latin boy band Menudo before launching his solo career in 1991.
His song "Livin' La Vida Loca" rose to the top of the music charts in 1999 and propelled Martin to stardom.
Martin said he decided years ago to not share "my entire truth" with the world because people he loved warned him that "everything you've built will collapse."...
I'm not a fan, but some of his music is very good.
Me encanta esto video. Esta mujer tiene labios tan bonitos (y curvas peligrosas). Es tarde y tengo que dormir. Buenos noches. Voy a dormir con la voz de Paulina en mi mente.
I'd like to comment, but my wife would kill me. Thalia (and Gloria Trevi) are on my wife's shit list, more than likely because of how my eyes light up when I watch them.
Al fin de video, tuve ganas de comer las uvas en su pecho, uno por uno y terminar el postre con los dos melones.
Si tuve que estar encarcelado por una eternidad con algien, escogaria Gloria.
Listening to these songs reminds me of living with my ex-wife in our condo in Massachusetts. I was so very unhappy there. Gloria's music put me in another world.
Escuchando estas canciones me recordaba viviendo con mi ex-esposa dentro nuestro hogar en Massachusetts. Estaba tan infeliz alli. La musica de Gloria me puso en otra planeta, bien lejos de esto inferno.
It may appear that I did not love my ex-wife, but the opposite is true. I loved her with all my heart, but she returned that love by imprisoning me. So long as it was our money, we could enjoy nothing. I wasted so much of my life with her. Perhaps we could have resolved our differences, but we did not.
I'd love to see my current wife preform this one on a runway while I watched.
I've died and been reborn several times over the course of my lifetime, each time losing all that I had to find that within every loss is born a new greater good. Nothing is permanent, even the passion of young love melts into oblivion to be replaced by a greater more profound love based not on passion, but upon wisdom.
The symbol you see next to my name on the top of this blog is "Om" the Hindu religious symbol. It is the sound of the Universe. It is what I strive to melt into. It is what I strive to be indistinguishable from. It is what I will be when I am no more.
I had the misfortune to be married to a woman whose sister is a narcissist. My ex-wife's sister, Loan, was obsessed with the song The Greatest Love, where Whitney Houston expounds on the wonderment of being in love with oneself.
No, the greatest love of all is the love of a parent for his child. Nothing else compares to it. I would exchange all that I have had, all that I have, and all that I will ever have, just to make the life of my daughter the slightest bit better. I adore her with all the love the Universe can hold. There is no greater love.
Here are two reports from the Department of the Really Weird.
Initially, a series of experiments showed that measurements an observer makes can influence events that have already happened in the past.
One experiment, reported by the Science Journal in 2007, confirmed that flipping a switch could retroactively change a result that had happened before the switch was flipped:
Even weirder still, the choice to allow the waves to recombine or not can be made even after the photon passes the fork where it should have split--or not.
Equally weird, the Journal Nature reports:
A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving.
*** Through a phenomenon known as 'superposition' a particle can be moving and stationary at the same time — at least until an outside force acts on it. Then it instantly chooses one of the two contradictory positions.
But although the rules of quantum mechanics seem to apply at small scales, nobody has seen evidence of them on a large scale, where outside influences can more easily destroy fragile quantum states. "No one has shown to date that if you take a big object, with trillions of atoms in it, that quantum mechanics applies to its motion," Cleland says.
There is no obvious reason why the rules of quantum mechanics shouldn't apply to large objects.
I hate to sound really snotty about this, but none of this surprises me. I have long believed in reverse causation. I do not believe that time is asymmetrical. I also do not believe that we grasp the laws of the universe at all. I could tell you more, but the world is not ready to hear it.
This is a very good article. It rings true to me. I am very happy that my interest in sex has declined. In fact, I'm beginning to view the whole romance thing that happens between young couples with the same annoyance one feels when seeing dogs mounting in the park. While they drown in the high of their hormones, they imagine that something more is going on than just two critters fucking in the park.
...All that testosterone drives the "Man Trance"-- that glazed-eye look a man gets when he sees breasts. As a woman who was among the ranks of the early feminists, I wish I could say that men can stop themselves from entering this trance. But the truth is, they can't. Their visual brain circuits are always on the lookout for fertile mates. Whether or not they intend to pursue a visual enticement, they have to check out the goods.
To a man, this is the most natural response in the world, so he's dismayed by how betrayed his wife or girlfriend feels when she sees him eyeing another woman. Men look at attractive women the way we look at pretty butterflies. They catch the male brain's attention for a second, but then they flit out of his mind. Five minutes later, while we're still fuming, he's deciding whether he wants ribs or chicken for dinner. He asks us, "What's wrong?" We say, "Nothing." He shrugs and turns on the TV. We smolder and fear that he'll leave us for another woman...
I'm probably a bit passed mid-life now. In fact, I bet I have already lived 2/3 of my life. Despite that, I'm still doing homework! After having studied German, Russian, Japanese, and Spanish, (and some others here and there), I'm now learning French. Go figure.
A concept called "survival of the kindest" is emerging from an increasing number of social science studies, demonstrating that we might be becoming more compassionate and collaborative in our need to survive in today's society.
According to Yasmin Anwar, who holds a Ph.D. in patient knowledge and chronic disease management, researchers at University of California/Berkeley are "challenging the long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish.
Contrasting Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, UC Berkeley psychologist, Dacher Keltner and other social scientists are building the case that humans are successful "because" of our nurturing, altruistic and compassionate traits.
"Human beings have survived as a species because we have evolved the capacities to care for those in need and to cooperate", states Keltner, author of "Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life."
"As Darwin long ago surmised, sympathy is our strongest instinct," he says....
The key to understanding Ayn Rand and the Objectivist movement is that Ayn Rand was a sociopath and that those who see her as vindicating their attitudes do so because they too are sociopaths. Ayn Rand's ideas have done nothing more than set humanity back a few aeons.
