The Published Writer

The noise of scrubbing the bathtub was drilling in his brain and the smell of the bathtub cleaner was making the headache behind his eyes even worse.

This morning, before leaving for work, his new girlfriend – the little red-headed daughter of the president chirped, “Hon, be a good boy. Please clean the bathtub.”

“Of course honey…Have a great day at work!” he remembered now replying. He suppressed an urge to vomit when he pooled her hair from the bathtub sink. 

She wasn't beautiful, she wasn't even “presentable”, as they say in these latitudes, but she was the grand-daughter president of the university where he was an assistant professor of creative writing.

When the bathtub finally looked…well, presentable, he washed thoroughly his hands while looking in the mirror.

His dark eyes, still alive and full of dreams, focused on his bushy hair of a young man that he was. He could now easily spot the first snow on the top of his head even without his glasses. “Thirty years on the planet… Twenty back home, ten in America”, he was thinking. “Still “the American dream” is far, far from reach.”

Sure – his first book was now a fact and it was now translated in 10 different languages. Still if it wasn't for that almost-a-joke on-line submission for that competition on the other side of the ocean, his manuscripts would have still been collecting dust on some big-ass publisher’s assistant desk here in the States.

But now, everything has changed. “I am signing my own book.” He was thinking, “People know me here and also back home.”

But things didn't really change. Did they? I was decided that the book will be selling for US $14 and the total print number was… well, presentable. But when the publisher, the agent and all the rest of the monkeys on the branch are factored in…

His bitterness wasn't young as he was. It was 1331 years old – like the country he came from ten years ago. “For $14 you get 240 dense pages or roughly 69,000 words. That’s 4,929 words for every dollar; a penny for every 50 words…”, “4.8 oz. 136 grams. 6 years of my life spent writing. For $14?”  

“Well, at least this is a good start, a possibility, a resume buster if nothing else. Also, I would love to see the face of Preacher when I hand him a signed copy of my book.”

“The preacher”… This was how he was calling his girlfriend’s grandpa - the church leader, turned University President. Or was it vice versa? In person of course he was calling him “Sir”. After all he was the president of the University with the presentable ranking number 574 where he was teaching the gun loving, bible reading youth how to write creatively in their own - mother tong language.

He closed the door of the tiny bathroom, now smelling offensively, behind his back and sat down behind his Mac. It was early morning and the huge, heavy Texan sun was already trying to burn this land full with sin as it was full with churches and pastors. He turned the power on and while waiting for his computer to boot, he directed his mind eye to the place now dark and cold.

In the place where he came from now was night and a freezing one too, as he learned from the on-line newspapers earlier this morning. It was the past of that place and his past too was where he was looking. 

He closed his eyes and quieted his mind, waiting for inspiration to come. 

Can I Go Back In Time Please?

Today our daughter misbehaved badly. She was running and screaming in the supermarket, getting the looks of disapproval of patrons who were diligently checking up the sale signs on the shelves.

When my wife finally caught her in her arms, my daughter slapped her and scratched her face with her little, razor-sharp fingernails.

Tonight, before going to sleep, my daughter was talking in bed with her mom. I overheard the following conversation.

My daughter: “Mummy, can I go tomorrow to the daycare?”

My wife: “Tomorrow’s Saturday honey, you don’t go to the daycare on Saturdays”.

My daughter: “But I want to! Please, please let me go back to the daycare.”

My wife:” Why would you like to go back?” 

My daughter: “I want to go back just for a while, so you can come and pick me up again before I hit you mummy.”

My daughter is 34 months old. She doesn't know yet that for good or for evil we all aren't allowed to go back in time to undo the bad things we inflicted on our loved ones.  

I was both deeply humbled by these simple words and also saddened at the same time. 

Soon enough she’ll learn the truth.

Killing Children

Just now on my computer screen a pop-up in red bold letters appeared.

“Breaking News!”

“Children, principal among the dead in Newtown, Connecticut elementary school shooting!”

I read the article, then I watch the short video. I don’t cry but my eyes get wet. I look at the picture of my daughter on my desk and then back on the screen my eyes go.

I know that by now, all the news agencies on the planet, TV, Internet, radio are abuzz and countless commentators, bloggers, and Internet commons will be sharing their feelings about this horror. 

On one of the photos I see children in line, walking, holding each other by their shoulders. Some of them are looking in the asphalt, some are crying. All children and adults on the picture are looking terrified. 

Reality fails me. Is this for real? Could there be anything worse than this?

Rapunzel and the Tower of Marzipan

(Not yore grandpas Grimm fairy tale)

The beautiful princess Rapunzel was living into exile. Banished into a tower made of sweet marzipan, the terms of the evil sorceress spell were slightly mad and strangely different from the classical fairy tale.

For the spell to be broken, a handsome and fearless prince was to come and eat the tower of marzipan, so Rapunzel could be set finally free.

After years of wait and desire for liberation, one day Rapunzel finally saw from the top of the tower a handsome brunet prince approaching on a sorrel white horse. 

Both the prince, when he arrived at the foot of the marzipan tower and the beautiful Rapunzel instantly felt that their hour of destiny was upon them. Both they knew in their very hearts, that right always overcomes wrong; beauty overpowers ugliness and good triumphs over evil in the end.

The prince started eating slowly the tower away. Gradually, approaching the moment when he would finally meet Rapunzel face to face, the prince (inevitably) morphed into an overweight memory of himself.

When the moment came, the beautiful princess was naturally displeased with his exterior appearance. She told him that after living into exile, into a prison made of marzipan, she needed some space and time for herself. Then she remembered that he was the one who liberated her and told him that it wasn't him it was her. She also added unconvincingly that he deserved better...

In the end she said nothing. She took away his armour and put it on herself. The prince was unable to use it anyway due to his size. She hopped on the horse slowly to dissolve away into the beautiful sunset, where the kingdom of beautiful people awaited.     

On “How life works” by Alex Williams

I recently have read an article in www.creation.com that saddened me after uplifting my spirits initially with its articulate and scientific – like style. The opening statement of How life works by Alex Williams is eloquent and bold. This is a material created by a scholar with many years of natural sciences and theological training and research experience. His belief in God and the wholly scriptures that prove His existence, His plan and the purpose of His design appear to be indestructible. 

“Life is not a naturalistic phenomenon with unlimited evolutionary potential as Darwin proposed. It is intelligently designed, ruled by immutable laws, and survives only because it has a built-in facilitated variation mechanism for continually adapting to internal and external challenges and changes.” the author statement is and he attempts to prove it using Louis Pasteur’s law of biogenesis, Professor Michael Polanyi’s principle of life’s irreducible structure. He gives some credit to Charles Darwin who “was correct in proposing that the species we see around us today have arisen via the mechanism of natural selection of natural variation, but he was wrong in extrapolating it to all life”. “All life” is extraordinarily large and complex matter to grasp and formulate even for Charles Darwin’s book The Origin of Species. It is also an amazingly tough undertaking to do it in a single article. It is also insulting to God, the more sophisticated reader and it is manipulative to the less sophisticated one.

A week after reading the article something isn’t feeling right. So, I decided to write a comment. I am not a scholar, nor did I dedicate years of my life to research like Mr. Alex Williams. I am not an atheist, nor am I a true believer like him. My comments are entirely my own point of view on the topic and merely thoughts of a laic.

Per Mr. Williams, Louis Pasteur “formulated a law of biogenesis—that life comes from life—a universal principle that has stood the test of time.” He continues that “Origin-of-life researchers continue to look for means of abiogenesis (life from non-life) but without success.” I believe that it is an incorrect statement.

It isn’t odd that “origin-of-life researchers continue to look for means of abiogenesis but without success.” If law of biogenesis is a universal principle that has stood the test of time, inevitably there should be a law of abiogenesis if God Himself has used abiogenesis to bring Adam into existence. But, perhaps, the origin-of-life researchers continue to struggle for means of abiogenesis without success because the time isn’t right yet for God to reveal the knowledge about this form of creation. Or, perhaps, there is a simpler explanation - such principle doesn’t exist at all.

The Book of Genesis provides a proof that God has used biogenesis to create Adam. “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” Gen. 1.26 . Evidently God created the heaven and the earth, the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, the cattle, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth prior to creating Adam.

Even the author of the article as a scientist will not be so ignorant to disagree that when God created Adam “out of earth”, that this same earth was not already been inhabited with recently created tiny forms of life. As Mr. Williams states that “life consists mostly of architecture and machinery made from long-chain molecules having a ‘backbone’ of carbon atoms tightly linked together, with hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur attached along the sides”. Initially God created these “long-chain molecules” and they were in the earth already before He created Adam. The creation of the microorganisms predates the creation of Adam as the Book of Genesis tells us. Adam was the last and the greatest creation of God.

Per Wikipedia “Microorganisms live in all parts of the biosphere where there is liquid water, including soil, hot springs, on the ocean floor, high in the atmosphere and deep inside rocks within the Earth's crust.” Therefore, as descendants of Adam and Eve we all must be “engineered” by using the same molecular structure and we must be following the same principles an intelligent designer imprinted as a coded information even in the simplest unicellular microorganisms found in the soil.  

In “Compartments, modules and signals” the author of the article is giving an example with a planarian flatworm - a free-living freshwater creature with two eyespots at one end and a feeding tube at the other end. When cut in half, each of the two halves normally regenerates a complete organism. However, when the beta-catenin signaling system is blocked, the head end regenerates another head and the tail end regenerates another tail.

The conclusion of the article is that “Despite life’s functional beauty, selection depletes gene pools and mutations degrade genomes, and extinction is coming on a time scale of only thousands, not billions, of years. Intelligent design plus rapid extinction point clearly to recent Creation and Fall, as the Bible tells us.”

What is insulting to the intelligence is the use of the argument “that the special structure of life’s machine-like components cannot be explained by (or reduced to) the properties of the atoms and molecules they are made of; something else is required.” The exertion until the whole the article, I realized by the end of it, is to prove the notion that because life is so complicated and follows certain laws to that day, the only possibility for it to exist is the intelligent design.

When watching the picture of the planarian flatworm cut in two in the article, I can’t really remove myself from the feeling that “all life” is a poorly designed experiment by a scientist with questionable ethics. Why would God create life and “program” it with a wrong code? Is it for all life to self-destruct? God should be wiser and greater that that. Perhaps all life has a reason beyond self-destruction or destruction by the Creator. If we exist by design, maybe we will understand the idea behind the design if we, as creators ourselves, are able to develop our own ethics to the level of Original designer’s ethics.

The strong, successful, middle-aged woman’s trepidation

When a single, good looking, successful woman in her early thirties finds on the Internet a heterosexual male with a job, single, willing to discuss his feelings and even shares his future plans of having a family and children, this naturally has a profound impact on her.

She takes an unplanned (urgent) vacation in the middle of a very important work project, gets on the first possible flight to meet him on a different continent. Even if he resides on a different planet, she will find a way to meet the male in question because such males are but extinct species on this planet.

The marvels of the Internet are one thing, the physical contact is still unmatched by the current technology. And, when it comes to evaluating the suitability of a male for possible husband material, the risks of such endeavors seem miniscule in comparison to the reward of “not being alone every night when I come back home crawling from work to have another take out dinner with the customary double scotch”. Typically the encounter is a disappointment if not a disaster but in rear cases it could turn to be the “real deal”.

We all have heard about dating websites that matched successfully couples who then married and lived happily ever after. In the media there are numerous happy end stories about the risk takers who plunge to swim or drown into the deep waters of extreme dating.

The way I see it is that if there is a male in his late thirties who is heterosexual, has a good paying job and is available for marriage – there are limited reasons for this situation to exist. None of these reasons are pleasant or pretty. On the other hand, researches show that people do not change too much emotionally or character wise after the age of twenty one.

I believe that, when it comes to any relationships it is all about the reciprocity and the art of balance. Give enough and receive enough. If you give too much - you will soon be left with little or nothing. If you take too much – soon little or nothing will be left for you to receive. And then there is a certain tipping point when there is too much misbalance when the relationship heads to the ground like an airplane with a comatose pilot and finally the relationship crashes and burns.

The symptoms of a relationship headed for a disaster are somehow indistinguishable in the everyday calamities of today’s busy world. Relationships are also about compromising. All parties in a relationship inevitably make compromises. When one party though is at the compromising side most of the time, such relationship will most probably crash somewhere along the way.

I have no answer if one should travel long distances or spend much of ones time in effort to be in a relationship or spend some time to learn how to recognize the symptoms of a potentially rotten relationship. Definitely I do not think that a strong, successful, middle-aged woman should let the fight-or-flight response the acute stress of a woman who fears that a husbandless, childless future is imminent to decide her destiny.

If I knew the answers to her enigma I would be a wealthy guru advising such women. Their number is mounting due to the social, economical and technical progress. So, I can only admire them when I meet them.

God - the highest authority on God

I have met an elderly Jew, (a dear friend and a mentor later in my life) who came back to his country of birth (and my now former country) for the first time after the Communist regime collapsed in the late 1980s, after 35 years in exile. 


Over a lunch in a nice, western looking restaurant, I've asked him about his religious orientation (something I would never ask in my new country). He made a painful grimace and said "In the name of religion millions have died that's why I am not religious."  


In our country religion was banned and illegal until recently. Just a few months earlier even discussing religion would have been an apocryphal theme. And perhaps that's why even more desirable discussion to me so I was disappointed to hear that he was not religious. I've asked him if he was an atheist - something celebrated, again until recently, in my country as one of the virtues of the model citizen. "No, no", he said and smiled, "I do believe in God, I just do not believe in religion".  


It was an alien concept to me back then. Separating religion from  faith. God or a supreme being existing separately and independently from religion... It didn't make too much sense to me.


We have been thought that "religion is the opiate of the masses", and the photo of Karl Marx was a fixture in every classroom next  to the politburo leaders. We were all atheists and proud to chant it in public. Yet in the privacy of our homes we would say every year a prayer on Christmas before dinner. We all believed in the Communist party - another  emanation of a God. A recently conceived and born God - now almost extinct religious belief. But even Marx fell short of saying "There is no God."


What is sad to me now sitting in front of our big screen TV is how organized religions is trying to abduct faith. Using all possible media   in a quest of "soul hunting" everything is allowed. The believer is the "customer". God's contemporary apostles are salespeople. Selling the product is the focal point of religion. In the media realm organized religion becomes  somehow transposable with  faith. When soliciting on behalf of God, religion is the highest authority on God. 


Of all things in the universe faith is probably the only unchanging thing. One has it or not. It's so simple. Organized religions, on the other hand, has been changing since their respective inceptions and it will continue to evolve (or de-evolve) appear and to disappear until the end of time. 


I do believe that evolution is a necessary for the society as it is for religion in order to survive the ever changing reality of this world. But this only could mean that religion is from man and not from God.  Faith is from God. He (or She) is absolute. That's why one believes or not.


In Revaluation 22:13 God says: "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end." In Isaiah 41:4 God elaborates: "I am he."

God is the highest authority on God. People can and do connect with God (or Goddess) if they believe without the mediation of religion or they do not connect if they do not believe and religion is of no use for them. Religion is part of the man's realm at least as much (and sadly sometimes more) as God is. 


The question ultimately is personal and independent from religion and from God: 
"Do you believe or not?" Man alone is the highest authority when it comes to believing or not.

Commercials With Dorky Looking Males

Dorky looking males who play the role of ... a dorky looking males. Badly shaven with apparently self-inflicted haircuts, this individuals occupy the advertisement realm promoting everything from mouth wash to the fastest internet ever (that goes even faster after six months). The same faces rotate  jumping throughout products and ad genres. 


The character is usually married to an impossibly beautiful woman and have kids who does not resemble him or the pretty lady who plays the mother. The setting is one of success and abundance. The dork has zero-common sense and can't choose the right product (service). 
The beauty who plays his wife in the ad, charmingly intelligent and suspiciously knowledgeable about the product in question, points out the obvious even for a chimp advantages of the product or the service. The guy slaps his forehead of-course. They kiss, hug and the kid joins them in the celebration. Then they all live happily ever after using the right product. Amen!


The sad part here is that  such scenarios are so pesky that I suspect perhaps they even work on the masses. I don't know who is the idiot here - the company who hired the advertisement company, the execs of the ad company, the public who is supposed to swallow and digest the crap?


Come on, even Amanda Gates is a sweet looking next door type woman, not a bombshell-scientist who was lended by CSI - Timbuktu for the commercial. I am not even going to her husband's common sense.


Smarten up people!

Of Sunset Haiku and verbal paintings made of exactly 81 syllables

I love haiku. It feels to me like the short wakizashi sword in the hands of a samurai warrior who lost his long katana sword in a battle with more skilled swordsmen and is forced to battle an uneven fight.

Haiku can touch the reader’s heart in a quick, throbbing moment causing tears, sometimes a smile. Just like wakizashi that sends one’s soul to the creator with a tear or... with a last smile.   

I find this “weapon” exotic and I have tried to master it when I lost my own Katana. 

All knowledge came to the west from the east. Haiku as an art form came to the West in the early 20^th century and many have attempted to master it since. It came from the east where the sun comes from in the morning to the west where the sun retires in the evening.

I have experimented with haiku and came up with a form I decided to call “A Sunset Haiku”.  I use 3 lines of 9 syllables Haiku as a building stones. I incorporate them into 9 sonnets to integrate them in one, coherent “western-tradition” poem. 

Each sonnet of the poem can subsist separately as a haiku. All nine pieces combined, develop into 9 logically connected haikus, telling a story, transmitting a message or an creating an image of a verbal painting made of exactly 81 syllables.

I feel that the Sunset Haiku found me. I did not invent it. I just followed, so I could tell my stories in a new way. If one has something to say the style is of secondary importance. Nevertheless, I enjoy telling stories using the Sunset Haiku.

Visit my other project to read some Sunset Haiku

http://thesadthingspoetryproject.blogspot.com/

Enjoy.

The Power Of Profound Life Experiences

Profound life experiences generate powerful energy. Like the sun - a basic element that supports all life on earth, but also it is the reason for the most beautiful garden to turn into a desert full of memories – the energy generated out of a profound life experience can destroy or create. As the sun isn't good nor it is bad, this energy is just there as a fact of life.

We could use the sun to heat up water and have a tea. Or one could omit to put on a hat on a hot sunny day and fall on the street hit by a sun stroke.

Similarly, we can let that spur of excess energy to make us really miserable and ultimately destroy the life itself. Or we can choose to use it creatively, enjoy life and make others happy.

It always has been and it will be a matter of choice in this life. 


Choose wisely.

“Who Wants To Live Forever?” (Life Separation Anxiety)

A dear friend of mine forwarded to me an article that was published in The Guardian under the title “Top five regrets of the dying” and requested my comments. Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She recorded their dying epiphanies in a blog called Inspiration and Chai, which gathered so much attention that she put her observations into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

Fist of all, the article made me sad. The focus of it is on the regrets people have “in the clearing, at the end of the path” as beautifully Stephen King put it when it comes to the end of one’s life in The Dark Tower - his Magnum Opus.

Surely people have positive thoughts at the end of the life as well. Or do they? Many have had their thoughts, feelings and fears of death incorporated in their creative works. In fact, I believe anyone who has ever created any piece of art has been equally concerned with death as with life.

As I see it, life is our memory of the past, our present (or the perception of it) and our hopes and dreams for the future. Death, on the other hand, is the state of past, present and future deficiency that creates the life separation anxiety in all of us of the unknown that expects us all. There, in the grey area between both worlds, religion, myth, dreams, nightmares, hopes and fears reside eternally. Both life and death in our realm subsist in a constant state of antagonism with varying degree of urgency, depending on our progress on the “path” of life towards death.

What contemporary people are missing, I believe, is the perception of the bridge between the life and death.

When on one side of it, on a small, elegantly written metal plate, one reads “Meaning”. This is the name of the bridge between life and death. Perhaps the same message is on another bridge - between death and life too.

The fear of change from one (more or less) known state of existence we call life, the desire to complete an uncompleted pilgrimage(s), regrets, chances lost, all we wished and we still wish for, make the passing to the other side (more indefinite than known) – death, hard to comprehend and to accept.

But life has no meaning without death and death has no meaning without the corresponding life. The whole meaning of life thus becomes death and vice versa.

Paulo Coelho, in his life exploratory work Veronika Decides to Die, vivisects one young woman’s desire to depart early from life to find the all powerful desire of most of us to stay in this world for a little longer. Some people must be "shocked" into wanting to live.  For others, the few remaining moments on the path are equally important as the whole journey in order to build their bridge with the name “Meaning” on it. 

The day before Apple announced Steve Jobs had passed away, the fact was confirmed that Steve worked on one of the newest products right until the very end.

In You Tube, under the video clip “Who Wants To Live Forever” for the movie Highlander by Queen, there is the top comment for the song by janzavec77 and it reads “this song tears your heart apart and it fills it with hope at the same time... “.

This is the essence of the bridge. One must dare to live… and to die. That was how the one who “dares to live forever” had built his own bridge and was able to have an eternal life with no regrets.

Funny (Blame Guttenberg)

Ten years ago, when Microsoft was still new to the Russian market, in a Russian web site I saw under the heading “Funny” a photo of a huge, multicolored Microsoft billboard advertising their newest Windows in Russian, attached neatly on an electric pole.  As grandeur as the slogan prizing the product was the intellectual property anti-theft warning: “Stealing a purse or stealing software - two crimes punishable by law”. Bellow the billboard, glued on the pole, printed on a simple A4 with the biggest font possible to fit on the paper, was a serial number for the Windows advertised above. About five years ago the American government prosecuted some kids for downloading and sharing music files. Today the digital piracy is still vital as always and the US government incentives like S.O.P.A. are in the vicinity.        

The technological progress makes it possible for the instantaneous creativity and innovation simply because of the instantaneous nature of the Internet. The information itself (copyrighted or not) is the biggest asset available to men today. The exchange of information on the Internet is becoming the main source of income for large industry hippopotamuses like RIAA and Google and for small Mom-and-Pop proprietorships alike so, naturally, it is going to be the main battlefield for resource distribution and re-distribution.

The Stop Online Piracy Act full title is "To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes." per Wikipedia. The major accent here is to “combating the theft of U.S. property”. This seams to be all about. The property of the United States of America is endangered.

The sad misconception at the top of the food chain is that information is like the oil, the gold or the corn. Whoever controls it – controls the physical world. Blame Guttenberg for inventing the printing press or blame Leonard Kleinrock's, J.C.R. Licklider and Robert Taylor for their original idea of the network. The genie is out for good or for evil. The information (or the knowledge) is like the water in the toilet – once you flush it - is gone. But gone for you, not for the plumbing of your house, nor for the municipal plumbing or the fish in the lake where it ultimately ends up.

Innovative people (usually somewhere in Japan) collect such water, recycle it and reuse it. The waste is recycled too and turned into a fuel and used to power cities… Other places (usually in the US) start thinking about the waste in the drinking water when the taste is really unpleasant.

It is all about perspective. Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian educator, philosopher and scholar who is known for coining the expressions “the global village” and “the medium is the message”. He predicted the WWW almost thirty years before it was invented. The Internet is the medium and it is the message too.

Knowledge is from the Gods. Prometheus stole the fire from Zeus. Zeus then punished him for his crime by having him bound to a rock while a great eagle ate his liver every day only to have it grow back to be eaten again the next day. 

I think that no one could possibly contain the message when it is out in the open not even the US Congress. 

The sad guy with the birthday cake

At the line at the supermarket my wife and I were trying to apprehend our hyper active daughter who was simultaneously singing at the top of her lungs, dancing in the shopping cart and attempting at the same time to grab a candy from the shelf next to the nice lady at the cash register. Behind us came a young man with big glasses and a sad eyes behind them and placed an ugly white vanilla cake with a pink “Happy birthday Lonny” in the middle of the oversized sugar roses. My daughter has stopped singing said “Hi dear!” to the guy and then slapped with her tiny hand heavily on the plastic cover of the cake producing a loud noise, a blush on my wife’s face and my fast reaction to stop the second slap on the cake. “Sorry”, my wife said. “Sorry”, I said. “Sorry my dear”, my daughter screamed with joy.

The guy said to us with obvious embarrassment “Oh, no problem, no problem at all”, then to my daughter “You are cute little girl, what’s your name?”

By that time the news papers stand was the target of the little hands, so the nice man did not get to know my daughter’s name.

Later in the car, after we repeatedly instructed my still singing daughter what things aren’t allowed in the supermarket, my wife told me that the young man with the unfortunate birthday cake was perhaps a social worker who was taking the cake to a house for underprivileged kids. She is a child psychologist who works with many of these kids.

“Perhaps”, I said, because it was ten minutes to seven P.M. and I’ve noticed several magnetic access cards hanging on his neck,”it was one of the computer dorks from the bank building next door”. He and his co-workers are going to have a birthday party next to the water cooler”.

Perhaps none of us had guessed his occupation. I think it is interesting how we bend what we see around us around what we really are.

Friends who are suddenly too busy

Of course we all have friends that suddenly are too busy when we really need them. The feeling of sadness in such cases is only the tip of the iceberg. Why some friends stick with us even harder in times of our weakness and others vanish like the mid-morning fog chased by the breeze, does not concern me. What is amazing is the fact that the ones that stay and the ones to go are always the most unexpected.


In the aftermath of a life altering crisis I can't help but smile. I have the best friends whom I can trust. I also have a better understanding of the core substance of the friendship itself. As everything else in the universe it is alive, changing and evolving endlessly.

Time flies when spent with true friends

We all have, at some point in our lives, true friends who in the most difficult moments come to rescue us. When it is time for them to leave and go back to their own daily lives, we never insist for them to stay a little longer. They have their own pains to go back to, their own realities where they feel lonely and afraid in the silence of the night, just as we do.

When we say good bye and then they depart there is always this momentum of uneasy feeling when we separate. In such moments of sadness I smile and say a silent prayer for them and a thank you for having them. 

The Swiss watch

One day the neighbour of my friend knocked on her door and with worried look on his face told her that his dog needed an urgent surgery but he haven't have enough money to pay for it. She invited him in and started the café maker. He told her that he would like to sell some of his possessions but wouldn't go to a pawn shop as he felt this was too impersonal and desperate. “What kind of things you would like to sell”, my friend curiously asked. “Well,” he said, “I have a Swiss watch, a rifle and a bike I never use”. “A rifle?” my friend asked going instantly back in time when she was a little girl when her dad showed her and her younger brother how to hunt. “Yes, an air-gun, my Swiss watch and the bike, I never use them and I want them to go to nice person who will use them and appreciate them.” My fiend was instantly sold and bought the 3 items from her friend. She told me this story the day she gave me the Swiss watch as a present. She said that it is a man’s watch that she is not using it and that I fit into her friend’s condition for possession – use it and appreciate it. She also told me that she gave the bike to her friend to use it to go to work every morning. “I am keeping the rifle” she said it reminds me of my dad. While I write I wear the beautiful watch. It is an automatic. Nevertheless I have at least 5 watches to check the time around me including the one on my desktop, I wear it so I would stay “alive” and I could see the flywheel moving on the face of the watch. I also remember the stories that go with it – the sad one about a sick dog and the beautiful one about good people.

Commercials with hot, confused females

Ah, the commercials…Love them or hate them – they are always there to guide you when you have lost your true direction in life. The commercials with hot, confused females who for example are unable to decide what the right toothbrush is. Wandering, touching timidly brand free toothbrushes with confused, pretty face. A confident male with gorgeous 37 teeth smile and a professional looking outlook of a very successful dentist offers the right choice to the confused beauty. The music suddenly changes from depressed tonality to a full-of-life tune. The colors of the set are brighter and the confusion vanishes replaced by a confidence and an approving nod of a beautiful, bright faces. 

What makes me sad is the thought that the creators of such commercials are idiots or they believe that the potential buyers of their products are idiots. I am less sad in the first scenario. The fact that I see lately more of these wonders of commercial creativity makes me think that perhaps these ads work and then the second scenario is true. 

What makes my life easier is that I am bothered enough by such ads to write this down. Somebody might read it and little by little we will all boycott the products represented by silly ads. At least until the offending companies change their advertisement to cover the rest of us who (I wish) are the majority of the viewers.

Gypsy boy

With the most charming smile he was shouting “Hey miss, give me some change. It is now time for lunch and I am hungry”. “Sir, it is almost lunch now and I am hungry. Would you please help with some change?” Some people were smiling to the little guy and were giving him small change. Others, looking busier, and for some reason angrier than they were, were just passing him by.

I watched for a while saddened by the fact that so many kids walk hungry and truly there is no need for that as it is now 21st century not the middle ages. 

I purchased a big double cheese double meat burger and approached the kid who looked about 6 years old and said to him “Your lunch have just arrived little Sir.”

One could not possibly be happier than that little kid on that sunny East European market place at about lunch time. “Oh, a meat toast!” he exclaimed. “I am so happy!”

When I remember this boy I always feel sad. Then I smile. If that boy can smile – I can smile too.

Tantrum

My wife and I went to pick my two year old daughter up from the daycare and we saw her at the window waiting for us. Her perfect little face lit up in a smile and we could read on her smiling lips “ mammy and daddy”. Behind the window, next to my daughter little kids appeared and immediately glued their faces to the window, some of them smiling, others making funny faces. I waited in the vestibule for my wife to go inside to get my daughter.

After 10 minutes I started wondering why they are not out yet. In a few minutes they've finally got out. My wife with the typical signs of a migraine onset, my daughter with tears on her face. I instantly went into their sad state emotionally and asked my wife what happened. Aparently my daughetr’s boots were misplaced, another kid who left took my daughter's socks and the process of putting on the clothes took too long for my baby daughter’s tolerance for waiting to see daddy, so she did “the tantrum”.

Explaining the situation my wife concluded “and now I’m having a headaghe” with a miserable face expression. My daughter stopped crying and looked at her mommy. “Head hearts?”, she asked. My wife responded, “yes dear it hurts very much”. “I put a magical bandate?”, my girl asked seriously. Both me and my wife gasped in surprise. “Ok…”, my wife said. The little doctor in her mom's hands took an imaginative bandate and applied it on my wife’s forehead the she kissed her and said, “It’s Ok now”.

Were the sad moment go?  

The dream in the Moleskine notebook

The past comes to visit sometime in my dreams. It’s always behind a bullet proof glass. We can see and hear each other but we can never touch, hug or change each other no more.

Once I told my friends that sometimes I have vivid dreams that are so strange that I wish I could record them and write a story based on my dream. They got me a Moleskine notebook as a present to keep close to my bed so if I weak up from a dream with an inspiration to write to use it and record my dream. Today it happened for the first time.

I remember I recorded my dream with a pencil and then fell asleep again. When I woke up again I found the broken pencil inside the note book next to the finished story about the book and took a photograph that I placed below my story.

……………………………………………

The phone was ringing.

I was trying to talk to her trough the strange, unfamiliar device bit I could only hear her labored breathing (into the same communication device). I could only imagine her in the distant hospital room. My pencil just broke but I could still write somehow.

The phone rang once more.

Trough the vanishing dream my fingers desperately were tapping on the bizarre device where the symbol for visualization appeared to be but I could still only hear her but could not see her. Damned pencil! I will soon be unable to write…I will totally break down.

The phone rang once more.

The device, her voice and my whole dream disintegrate in rush like a Champaign bursting out of the bottle but into reverse. Like into a dream I am now partially awoken and I answer the phone. A familiar voice that saved my life once before again with a phone call is asking me "How are you:"… I say “thank you for saving me from the nightmare” and I realize the peculiarity of the moment. My pencil just broke… "I should not be sad" I thought, "It was just a dream". But I couldn’t stop the sadness or myself being a part of it. 

The squirrel

This sad story was given to me by another friend who loves the nature and little animals in particular. She has 3 cats at home and she is keen to feed any street animal that would come by to indulge the treats she always carries with her in a plastic container. She recently adopted four squirrels who reside in her back garden. She feeds then every day and knows more about them than probably they do. She even named them and was treating them as friends, perhaps an extended family – something that if all people were doing, this planet would have been a better place. One day when she was feeding them in the cold January afternoon, an eagle flew down from a tree and snatched one of the squirels and flew up to the sky. The poor beautiful rodent fought for its life and was able to free itself from the birds claws but the distance from the moment of freedom, the ground and the law of gravity ultimately decided its fate. My friend ran to attempt to revive the it but it was its day to go back to its creator so she buried her friend and went home heavy hearted. She was feeling personally hurt, unable to comprehend the cruelty of the end of a life that was part of hers for several months. She then thought about the eagle. Who was feeding the eagle? The eagle’s chicks offspring? There are no favourites in nature. If she did reside at this particular house and did not took care about this particular squirrel, she wouldn't be sad at all. This made her cope easier with the death of her friend. It is a story, but I like it. 

The right balance between love and common sense

One of my friends recently got a very prestigious and expensive scarf from a boutique in Paris. Sadly her sister did not consider the style and the colors that she likes dooming the unfortunate present to the sad future in the abyss of the things we never wear but cannot dispose of them either. Her sister gave her this gift in front of friends and family so my friend did not say anything to her. Should she have told her sister that her gift was thoughtful but she would not wear it? Should she have asked her to exchange it? How to make sense of something like this and move on? This wasn't the first time that my friend was in this place with her sister and won't be the last my friend said.
We all probably have at least one close friend or a family member who seems to not understand basic things about us. I do. My aunt is like that. She gave me a massive golden ring on one occasion and when I see her I must wear it, so she wouldn't ask me “why you are not wearing the ring I gave you?”… My friend (who is a pilot) told me that he saw my ring from his air-plane cabin while descending over the city and knew right away that I was meeting my aunt that day.
Joking aside, it is both frustrating and sad when such things tip the balance of reciprocity any human relationship requires in order to be harmonious and fulfilling. The predicament is even more challenging when the person in question is our close family member and we cannot just shut him or her off. Years pass by and this particular person again and again does things that offend the feeling of balance in us and we just cannot deal with this and move on.
All relationships are like life itself – dynamic; never static. We can and should at least try and balance the things that are out of balance in our daily life and make such sad relationships evolve and be more harmonious. For example I have tried many times to change my aunt’s behaviour that lacks common sense and sometimes is plain offensive. Well, I am still trying. She isn't a bad person. On the contrary she is always ready to offer her help or advice or a “nice” present when occasion is present. She doesn't get my taste for… well anything really. But when I think of the world where I may weak up tomorrow and she isn't in it – all her imperfections seam somewhat unimportant. 
When I see the things from that particular angle – I wonder if the missbalance isn’t partly my responsibility. Am I not too focused on the fact that I give (or take) more in my relationships with the people closest to me? Am I trying to just put myself into to the other person’s shoes?
Life isn't perfect but it’s too short to focus on its imperfections. 
Moving on…