John F. Kennedy said something truly terrifying--guaranteed to make every parent's blood run cold: "To have a child is to give fate a hostage." - Bourdain on becoming a father

She's not even mine and my blood ran cold. Which is probably why I should start with a bigger plant, some pet fish, or maybe a puppy.

Because I can't say this on Facebook...

(Because as far as The Parental Units are concerned, I am their innocent, alcohol-free baby daughter)


I will say it here.


Is Hemingway right? Is it really better to "write drunk; edit sober"? Because I was blocked like hell until I cracked that first bottle open...

Photo from majoytheindian.deviantart.com

And then I started dancing around while doing the dishes. And then I stopped staring at that fricking blinking cursor (I HATE that fricking blinking cursor) and started typing instead.

Anatomy of a Marriage - the 17th version

Stolen from her Facebook. I hope I'm not violating any laws or rights.
So so so so beautiful.

Anatomy of a Marriage - the 17th version
by Rica Bolipata Santos

Ever since we turned 15, I've added to this list every year. So here's the 17th lesson, in celebration of our 17th year!

So here is my summary. 15 lessons from a middle-aged marriage.

1. Adjust your stride.

2. Love and need his solitude as much as you love and need yours.

3. Know the difference between personality and weather-related behavior.

4. Have sex, often.

5. At that moment when an argument asks your heart to grow bigger, just say yes. Don't be naive. Of course, it will be painful.

6. Small kindnesses add up. As do small petty actions. Choose the kindnesses.

7. Not everything is about love. Most things are not about you.

8. Never look to the other for your source of happiness. That’s a pretty dangerous path. Your happiness is in your own hands.

9. Your primary relationship is with yourself.

10. It takes a village to make a marriage work. Let people in!

11. Always remember the good stuff. Here’s why I married him- because he knew the way the wind and the sun moved. He places chimes and thermometers and most things were they belong best. It is the sexiest thing, ever.

12. Remind each other about God.

13. Make each other better parents. Parenting is not a war between you two.

14. Grow a garden, together. Or grow your own garden and ask him to sit with you once in a while, in your garden.

15. Be happy with what you have. There is nothing better on this earth than loving someone completely. Above all, practice gratefulness.

16. Hold each other often in small ways-hold hands while walking, smoothen backs while watching tv, kiss suddenly while on facebook, place hand on cheek during mass as your sign of peace, place head on shoulder once in a while. Never let your bodies forget each other. It has its own version of memory.

17. Be grateful for the ability to love deeply, in deep time. Not everyone can swim and survive in this mystery.

Food for thought.

Found.

"This is your life. Do what you love, and do it often. If you don’t like something, change it. If you don’t like your job, quit. If you don’t have enough time, stop watching TV. If you are looking for the love of your life, stop; they will be waiting for you when you start doing things you love. Stop over analyzing, life is simple. All emotions are beautiful. When you eat, appreciate every last bite. Open your mind, arms, and heart to new things and people, we are united in our differences. Ask the next person you see what their passion is, and share your inspiring dream with them. Travel often; getting lost will help you find yourself. Some opportunities only come once; seize them. Life is about the people you meet and the things you create with them, so go out and start creating. Live your dream, and wear your passion. Life is short."

Yan ang LIKE.

Kung kilala lang kita, ni-like ko na yung comment mo. Pero friend of a friend ka lang.

And just in case I'm a real Luddite and you can't read what the Smart Stranger posted:

"Do not let the misfortune of others stop you from saying grace of your blessing...that is a misfortune in itself. Extend care but don't let it bind you down, cause that means you are letting your light be controlled by things outside you!"

Stuff you find when cleaning the study...

...because Nelly needs space for Galvatron (his computer):

29 July 1999

Three things one should do, according to my Ph103 professor, Fr. Santos:

1. Climb a mountain and feel like Superman;

2. Walk along the seashore and feel insignificant; and

3. Cuddle a baby and know that you're somewhere in between.

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings. - Anais Nin

"I believe if there's any kind of God it wouldn't be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between. If there's any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, it's almost impossible to succeed but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt." - Celine, Before Sunrise

At least, my dear,
You did not have to live to see me die.

Considering how many things I did that must have caused you pain,
Sweating at certain memories, blushing dark blood, unable
To gather home my scattered thoughts that graze the forbidden hills, cropping the mind-bane,
I cut from the hedge for crook the one disservice
I never did to you,--you never saw me die.

I find in my disorderly files among unfinished
Poems, and photographs of picnics on the rocks, letters from you in your bold hand.
I find in the pocket of a coat I could not bring myself to give away
A knotted handkerchief, containing columbine-seeds.
A few more moments such as these, and I shall have paid all.

Not that you ever--
O, love inflexible, O militant forgiveness, I know
You kept no books against me! In my own hand
Are written down the sum and the crude items of my inadequacy.

It is only that there are moments when for the sake of a little quiet in the brawling mind I must search out,
Recorded in my favour,
One princely gift.
The most I ever did for you was to outlive you.
But that is much.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Fontainebleau, 2007.


"The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration."
- Pearl S. Buck

Words of Wisdom

...from a faraway fwend.

"Fear less, hope more; eat less, chew more; whine less, breathe more; talk less, say more; hate less, love more; and all good things are yours." ~Swedish Proverb

Hey-Men.

There's one sad truth in life I've found
While journeying east and west -
The only folks we really wound
Are those we love the best.
We flatter those we scarcely know,
We please the fleeting guest,
And deal full many a thoughtless blow
To those who love us best.
~Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Quotable Quotes: A Backward Glance (Edith Wharton)

What I've underlined so far...

Years ago I said to myself: "There's no such thing as old age; there is only sorrow."
I have learned with the passing of time that this, though true, is not the whole truth. The other producer of old age is habit: the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia. Luckily the inconsequent life is not the only alternative; for caprice is as ruinous as routine. Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habit, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

* * *

The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances at any subject cross like interarching search-lights.

For the bookworms out there.

Stolen from Tet's Facebook.
Rules: * Grab the book nearest you. Right now. * Turn to page 56. * Find the fifth sentence. * Post that sentence along with these instructions in a note to your wall. * Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

If I go with the one to my left:
As we continued on farther, Charlie had concealed himself and set up an ambush, which he let us walk right into before he sprung the trap.

Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam

If I go with the one on the shelf above me:
4 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil

Cookery Book: The Cook's Classic Companion

How fun! Your turn :)

More from Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam

September 19, 1966

Dear Mom, Dad, Shrub, Peach, and the Future President:

I was walking along a trail and turned to my left to tell one of my men to get his tocus up to the head of the column when I heard a loud noise below me and felt like some one had kicked me right in the butt. So the mighty oak fell to the ground, [after] having urged his men on to greater heights of glory with the resounding battle cry of "Oh, shit!" I thought I had been hit by a booby trap, and it wasn't until three to five seconds had passed that I realized that people were shooting at us in general and me in particular since I was still lying on the road. This also occurred to my unalert band of cutthroats, and one of them dragged me off the road and down an embankment, which felt oh, so good.

By the time I regained my form and was screaming at my men to return fire and charge the ambush--which they did to no avail--while my corpsman was explaining to me that they had never taught him how to bandage up a wounded butt. I explained to him in graphic detail what the consequences to his personage would be if he didn't think up a way, and quickly. He invented a way, using my penis as an anchor or something--anyway, as an integral part of the mummifying act. The helicopter came, and I was thrown aboard and taken to the hospital in Chu Lai...

So, I am lying in bed here, and it comes time for that most thrilling event: "When the General Gives Out the Purple Hearts." The general in this case is a two-star general, a big, gruff, hearty type whose first words to me were, "Aren't you the one who wrote on that form that supplies weren't getting to the troops? Can you give specific examples?"

So, what the hell, I gave him a few, and he, predictably enough, cut me off, explaining how the folks back home were having to be forced to make utilities. And in a very small voice I pointed out that a great deal of the problem was right here in River City. He ignored that and never stopped smiling, although it got a little forced after a while and his entourage stood around with little grins etched into their empty faces, which occasionally laughed heartily whenever the general made a funny, which was signaled by his own chuckling. All in all, it was a dreadful performance by everyone but, in a way, a classic of stereotype, one of a large number of stereotype characters and situations I have watched acted out, much to my growing concern. They finally left me sicker than I was before and with a medal I never wanted anyway...

Love, Sandy

Lucky.

Finished reading Lucky by Alice Sebold for the nth time last night. I still can't read every word of Chapter 1. I still cry in the same parts (we're talking hagulgol mode here). I still marvel at how the truly gifted can write about the truly painful with such grace and clarity. I still feel lucky every time I put it down.

"He knew...that memory could save, that it had power, that it was often the only recourse of the oppressed, the powerless, or the brutalized."

The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination

June 5, 2008
J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address, "The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination," at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates...The first thing I would like to say is 'thank you.' Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I've experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world's best-educated Harry Potter convention.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called 'real life', I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.

They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents' car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.

What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience.

Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person's idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale.

An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.

Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement.

Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International's headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child.

I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country's regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people's lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world's only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children's godparents, the people to whom I've been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I've used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom: As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters. I wish you all very good lives.

Thank you very much.

A Many-Splendored Thing (Han Suyin)

"So I wish my love, if it be love that I bear you, to rest upon you no heavier than a butterfly."
"Darling, no one will say these nice things to her lover in your New Democracy," said Mark. "Everyone will be so busy with work, self-criticism and dialectics."
"Politics don't stop love. He will say to her: 'You are as beautiful as our new hydroelectric plant.' And she will reply: 'Comrade, how progressive of you.'"

* * *

To go on living one has to be occasionally silly; to cherish memories which in more detached moments exhale a pungent odor of embalming fluid; to finger old letters which the silver worm punches, to distort in the trappings of sentiment the ardors of love; to magnify into a saying the light, mocking word.

Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam

October 20. 1966

Dear Aunt Fannie,

This morning, my platoon and I were finishing a three-day patrol. Struggling over steep hills covered with hedgegrows, trees and generally impenetrable jungle, one of my men turned to me and pointed a hand, filled with cuts and scratches, at a rather distinguished-looking plant with soft red flowers waving gaily in the downpour (which had been going on ever since the patrol began) and said, "That is the first plant I have seen today that doesn't have thorns on it." I immediately thought of you.

The plant, and the hill upon which it grew, was also representative of Vietnam. It is a country of thorns and cuts, of guns and marauding, of little hope and of great failure. Yet in the midst of it all, a beautiful thought, gesture and even person can arise among it waving bravely at the death that pours upon it. Some day this hill will be burned by napalm, and the red flowers will crackle up and die among the thorns.

So what was the use of it living and being a beauty among the beasts, if it must, in the end, die because of them, and with them? This is a question which is answered by Gertrude Stein's "A rose is a rose is a rose." You are what you are what you are. Whether you believe in God, fate, or the crumbling cookie, elements are so mixed in a being that make him what he is; his salvation from the thorns lies in the fact that he existed at all, in his very own personality. There once was a time when the Jewish idea of heaven and hell was the thoughts and opinions people had of you after you died.

But what if the plant was on an isolated hill and was never seen by anyone? That is like the question of whether the falling tree makes a sound in the forest primeval when no one is there to hear it. It makes a sound, and the plant was beautiful and the thought was kind, and the person was humane, and distinguished and brave, not merely because other people recognized it as such, but because it is, and it is, and it is.

The flower will always live in the memory of a tired, wet Marine, and has thus achieved a sort of immortality. But even if we had never gone on that hill, it would still be a distinguished, soft, red thornless flower growing among the cutting, scratching plants, and that in itself is its own reward.

Love,
Sandy

On 11 November 1966, less than three weeks after he wrote this letter to his great-aunt Mrs. Louis Adoue, Marine 2Lt. Marion Lee Kempner, from Galveston, Texas, was killed by a mine explosion near Tien Phu. After he disarmed one mine, another was tripped by one of his men. Although wounded by shrapnel, Lt. Kempner ordered the corpsman to take care of the other wounded man first. He died aboard a medevac en route to the hospital. He was 24 years old.

For the red thornless flowers I have seen and heard and felt, both strangers and friends alike; past and present, in passing and in the trenches.