Very apt for today's news

"When a thousand, a million men, a thousand cities, fail to protect themselves against the domination of one man, this cannot be called cowardly, for cowardice does not sink to such a depth."

--Étienne de La Boétie

The Karma of America's Invasion of Iraq Explained in a Children's Book

I know one thing for certain; it's much harder to tell whether you are lost than whether you were lost, for, on many occasions where you're going is exactly where you are. On the other hand, you often find that where you've been is not at all where you should have gone . . .

Juster, Norton. The Phantom Tollbooth. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1989. 114.

I'm sorry this seat is already taken...

I was toying around with they idea of getting a domain name and typed dummy.com into the browser. www.dummy.com is a site about George W. Bush.

'nough said.

As for me, today was busy and then helped a friend setup up her laptop. Every time she didn't understand anything she would cry out, "How do they expect us mere mortal to understand any of this. And why do I need any of this software!!! That one! That one there! Can't you delete it?!"

It was her network card driver.

Anyway, she made it clear that she was grateful and was most adorable in her confused and very satisfied state.

And now to trace my thoughts along more serious paths (had you given up?). Just yesterday, I was able to resolve some pain that has been lingering around for the longest time.

I've been aware for years that I've been angry with someone. It has been a slow burn and I've used everything I can think of to get past this anger. Nothing has worked. It is someone about whom I really care and who I feel a lot of gratitude and friendliness for. But nothing would help. The anger burned on.

Finally, yesterday, I let go of the anger. I realized I was angry because this person embarrassed me and hurt me rather badly. And it struck me that the anger is really a judgment of this person. And why am I judgmental? Well, that's the way the world works. Someone makes a mistake and we hate them for it instead of simply loving them. Someone hurts us instead of loving us. So in order to ? fix ? the situation we hurt them back. Unconsciously we are vowing to hurt them long and hard enough that they love us better.

I've let myself hate people because I haven't known better. My hatred is no different than the ignorant hatred that allowed otherwise intelligent Americans to be lead into war by a fool. My hatred and the hatred that contorts the face of George Bush are the same hatred. And we are both engaging hatred as a strategy because we are ignorant.

So I am using hatred in an attempt to create love in my life. The thought goes something like this: If I hate you hard enough and long enough you will be in enough pain that you will be a better person, you will do what I want you to do, and, ultimately, you will love me for it.

I looked and looked at that yesterday and I realized it was laughable. How utterly ridiculous! I am embarrassed (you may substitute "hurt" "betrayed" "disliked" or any assortment of painful experiences here) and I respond by hating. I am hating this person so that they will give me the love I want. The more and more I looked at that the more laughable it became.

George Bush, sitting in a position of power that he doesn't know how to handle, was able to use hatred and fear to motivate this nation to take a embarrassing and tragic course of action. Nelson Mandela changed the course of his entire country because, when he came out of his unjust imprisonment, he didn't indulge anger.

Before I get angry at those I love, and especially those I don't, let me think long and hard on this...

History in the Making

I've been terribly busy in the last little while. I had company, got a HUGE Fantom Drive which took me days to fill, installed some incredible new software and wrote my first web application. She's a beauty, with full CSS styling, a hand-crafted Perl script and W3 validation. Man, she's hot!

Let's see, I also got my brother to take some annoying personal information about me off his homepage. I swear, he is such a difficult person. I was trying to tell him how I really didn't want details about a previous marriage out there for the world to see.

"But it's History!" he exclaimed increduously.

"Read a book," would have been one possible response. Or "I happen to be living my life right now." Jeez. Does he we're the Kennedy's or the Royal Family or something? It just made me want to gag.

There has never been any step along my path where my brother hasn't let me down. I've asked him the simplest of things in times of real need. Nope, couldn't do it. Everything has always been a drama.

So for all of you future college students out there who, in some distant future, maybe doing meticulous research into my early years--sorry.

Let's see. Oh, I decorated my room for Christmas. My decorations consisted of one string of multi-color lights (with a white wire) strewn across my altar. I paid $2.50 at Longs for them. That's it in terms of Decoration.

My focus this year for the holidays is "Let's put the IS back in Christmas!"

May you be well and not completely miserable this holiday season...

loads of fun...

I've been away for a few days because I've got new hardware and new software. I've, errr, been playing.

I just signed up for skype. Very cool. Last night I spoke with some random dude in Florida who had signed up to keep in touch with his daughter. I'm totally loving this modern world we live in.

Got some posts coming this week. In the meantime, if you happen to have absolutely nothing better to do, you can rip some LPs to your mp3 collection. "What?" I can hear you cry from here. Yup, some yahoo has figured out a way to rip LPs. He wrote some software, put his vinyl records into a **scanner,** and scanned the thing. Then his software converted the scanned image into music.

: )

So if your as interested in wasting some time as this guy was, you can check out his site and even listen to some samples.

http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/

That's all for now...

The wine empress is with the body

and the area travels the head office:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sockeyed/67651255/

Yup, I think that pretty well sums things up. At least, I suppose it does, depending on what you're trying to sum up.

ahem

and, now, a poem:

Have no--
the adult,
the child,
that look after/ with the old man--
prohibition
against the next
sea.

Swimming.

I'm down for the count...

I've not posted because I've been working on this blog's design. I'm pretty pleased with it. Not to happy with the colors yet.

Also, I'm not feeling all that well.

I've got some posts coming in the next few days.

Here's what I've got in the crock pot for tomorrow's breakfast:

~~Brown Rice Cereal~~

1/2 cup brown rice
little pieces of the following

• apple
• dried peach
• cried cranberries
• orange

and some spices:

• cardamon
• nutmeg
• salt
• tarragon

Everything's organic. Yum!