Triptych

I am thinking of getting this for the living room wall. That wall has been blank and empty since the day Dennis and I moved in, about 15 months ago. It's about time I hook it up with something pretty.
    

Easy uploading

If you upload files to Picasaweb, YouTube, Facebook or a few other sites, you owe it to yourself to check out the Fire/Universal Uploader Firefox addon. Instead of uploading one files at a time, this little app allows Firefox to just drag and drop files to upload them. Very sweet little addon!

Surprise!

My israeli babe just left a little surprise on my pillow. She left a note saying...
"pretty lame, but remember I'm a tourist!"
She bought me a fridge magnet. I'm so touched that I'm starting to tear up.

Trip trip tripping out

I'm tripping out over S (jewish babe). Our relationship just went one step beyond friendship, and now I don't know what's what anymore.

With A (my israeli babe) I know she is leaving in a month, and I've made my peace with it. With S, I don't know what's going to happen, or how things are going to go. It makes me irritated and confused when I don't have a clear picture of where things are headed.

Part of what makes it confusing is that we are friends. I'm almost tempted to say that we WERE friends, except that I still value her very much as a friend, and I believe she feels the same way too. I want to keep having that kind of buddy intimacy, while hopefully being able to indulge in the new frontiers that S and I have just explored.

I don't know what she thinks. I want to talk to her and really get into her mind, but I think that won't really be much good cos I don't think she really knows what she wants either. But damn, it would be nice to know, wouldn't it?

I'm very open to exploring where things lead to from here. S is a good girl. She's a little confused about what she wants in life, but then again, aren't we all? She's got a good heart, she's interested in improving herself, she has an open mind, what more could I ask?

I wish she'd read what I'm writing, so that it would be easier for me to talk to her...

I just realized that my blog entries are almost exclusively about money or women. I guess most other parts of my life are pretty much taken care of, so I just blog about what's on my mind at the moment. Which turns out to be (guess what?) money and women. Funny isn't it?

Wow!

Wow, it's been a long time since my last update hasn't it?

My life has been a roller coaster. I'm in the middle of a 4 month program called "Conducting Openness". The bottom line is that openness begets openness. By being open, we encourage people around us to be open.

However, we don't see others clearly. We see them through a haze of our judgements and unspoken affairs. It's like a pane of glass between two people. If the pane of glass is clear and clean, both people see each other clearly. However, if I have something I have unsaid to someone that is eating at me on the inside, then it is like there is a smudge on the glass. As more and more shit piles up, the glass becomes murkier and murkier, and eventually, I am no longer relating to the other person, and I am in fact just relating to all the piled up crap I hold inside.

I've been working on burning through all the crap that has piled up on the glass that surrounds my life in an effort to be more clean in my relating with others. I'm somewhat succeeding, although I have a looooong way to go.

Just recently, I told my parents that I feel ashamed that I cannot adequately take care of them when they need me the most. I told them that I knew they were not judging me because of my inability. Rather, I was judging myself based on what I deemed to be "right".

This notion of something being "right" or "wrong" is a pain in the butt. If there's a "right", then there's obviously a "wrong". And if I'm not "right", then obviously, I am "wrong". It becomes a pain in the ass because I arbitrarily label stuff as being right or wrong based on nothing more than my own judgements. For example, I was with a girl on a date. I gave her a tour of the house, then led her into my bedroom. She was sitting on my bed and smiling up at me. I kissed her. Then I pulled away and said something like "It wouldn't be right to lead you in here and seduce you. That's just tacky". She gave me a quizzical look, like what the hell are you talking about. Reflecting back, she was a consenting adult, and the only thing "wrong" about the moment was me not being to live fully in the moment, and instead labelling it based on some weird arbitrary standard of being.

Alwyn wrote a really cool piece on his blog.
http://alwynlau.blogdrive.com/archive/443.html

The piece itself isn't spectacular. What I find interesting is his comment in response to my two comments. Read it. It's worth the read. Honestly.

I've also started seeing a lovely girl. She's from Israel and is here on a work permit for a few months. She moves me in how she lives so fully in the moment. We were talking about her life in Israel, and she told me about how her house was all bombed out and she had to leave the country because her parents were afraid for her life. I was feeling sad for her losing her house, but she just said, "I'm alive. My parents are alive. Why should I be sad?"

This brings to mind another time... We walked out to buy cigs for her. Halfway down the block, she just turned to look at the sunrise and exclaimed, "Look! That's so beautiful! Quick, kiss me now!". And we held hands there on the road, two barely awake zombies watching the sunrise. I haven't seen a sunrise in who knows how many years...

She's heading back to Israel in late Jan or early Feb 2008. I know this relationship won't go anywhere. But I'm not too worried about what will happen in the next few months. I'm just living in the present.